whoa, for once owen mcshane is completly correct.
Our sleep/wake cycle is determined by our suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) and will continue to function without reguard to being day or night, as evidenced by a massive amount of studies conducted where people are put in constant light or darkness for months on end. The SCN does not run at exactly our day length though, it varies by about an hour depending on the person so without the light changes in day and night we eventually get out of synch with the accual day an night, though that is relativly irrelivant. The SCN however does detect light through special photosensitive cells in the eye which allows it to keep itself in synch, which is why you can use a bright light to prevent jet lag if you know when to use it.
The only disorders more prevalent in or around the artic circle is the increaced incidence of Seasonal Affective Depression which generally affects almost everyone in the winter (though some people get it in the summer ).
Infact the most effective non-drug/non-ECT therapy for depresion in the short term is to (ironiclly deprive the individual of sleep for a night and then allow the individual, the next day, to sleep from 5pm to midnight and then repeat for a week. lol.

The more likley causes here are that of stress and class. Probally due to an associated increaced activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

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Have people been living in the Arctic circle for only the last century?

I take it the Swedes who put up with months when the sun never sets have short life spans and succumb more frequently to cancer that those who live near the equator and hence enjoy a stable night/day cycle.

Which planet to the authors of this stuff live on when they talk about “the regular oscillation of night and day.”

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kiore,
my point was that, although they do not dirrectly state a causal relationship in the article, the article is clearly implying that there is when the research shows only correlation (and infact several things they say are blatently incorrect while others, such as the cancer, are easily explained through well known causes).
The National Geographic, much like the New Scientist, is not a journal and is hardly ment for an academic audience able to distinguish correlation from causation and as such this article is writen with extremmly poor academic integrity. It is almost an image of the infotainment which we call ‘news’.

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Actually if you reread the quote carefully you will see that National Geographic made no such claim that correlation entails causality. Correlation does however present a prima facie case for causality that needs to be investigated more thoroughly.

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>>The ‘cum hoc ergo propter hoc’ fallacy? Of course, philosophically, ’cause’ is very hard to pin down.

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Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.

For the past century or so, we’ve been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body’s sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.

ah, the ever high scientific standards of the national geographic! …never mind the factual accuracy of what you report…, …and never mind that you intentionly misrepresent the data to make it look to the unthinking that a correlational relationship is causal…

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