Headlines screamed that chronic insomnia ages your brain by 3.5 years and raises dementia risk by 40%—a claim from the Mayo Clinic published in a top neurology journal. But here's what got buried: the study showed no evidence that insomnia actually accelerates brain aging. Instead, researchers themselves suggested the opposite—that early brain changes might be causing the insomnia, not the reverse. We break down how a solid longitudinal study got flipped into a causation narrative it never supported, what the evidence actually reveals about sleep and cognitive decline, and why observational data gets mistranslated into medical panic. If you've ever wondered why headlines contradict the actual research, this is the perfect case study.

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