Find yourself dozing off in the middle of the day, no matter how hard you try to ignore the urge to nap? According to a new study, it could come down to your genetics. Published this month in the scientific journal, Nature Communications, the study suggests that while napping is a common activity, how long and how often you take a midday nap could be connected to a specific gene. “It was important to try to disentangle the biological pathways that contribute to why we nap,” Hassan Saeed Dashti with the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Genomic Medicine, and co-lead author of the report, said in a press release. Dashti said that napping is “somewhat controversial,” as the health effects are still debated. In this study, researchers focused on looking through the DNA of those with European ancestry, using more than 400,000 sets of DNA from the UK Biobank. They also tried to replicate their findings with more than 500,000 samples from 23andMe, a company where individuals can send their DNA in to track their ancestry. Source
