Want to live longer? Sleep more – but not too much
You may be fit, a healthy weight and a non-smoker with a low genetic risk of heart disease, but if you are sleep deprived – or sleeping excessively – you increase your chance of having a heart attack, a new study of nearly half a million people shows.
This is the first research to demonstrate that sleeping six to nine hours a night can protect against heart disease.
The risk of a heart attack increased by 20% for people who slept less than six hours a night during the seven-year study period, rising to 52% more for those who slept less than five hours.
Those who slept more than nine hours were 34% more likely to have a heart attack, the research by the University of Colorado in Boulder found.
University of Cape Town sleep scientist Dr Dale Rale said: “There is now a considerable body of evidence that shows that both short and long sleep increase risk for obesity (a major risk factor for many noncommunicable diseases), cardiovascular disease and metabolic conditions like diabetes (type 2), as well as increasing the likelihood of dying sooner, or dying from cardiovascular diseases.
“What is lovely about this particular study is that it is the first to intimate that healthy sleep may in fact be protective against heart disease for those who may be high-risk candidates for cardiovascular events based on their genetics.
“While many of these longitudinal studies focus on sleep duration, sleep quality is an equally important factor to consider in terms of protecting health.
“Sleep which is fragmented or mistimed, for example, can also increase risk for obesity and cardiometabolic diseases.”
The new study was published earlier this month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The senior author, Professor Celine Vetter, said: “This provides some of the strongest proof yet that sleep duration is a key factor when it comes to heart health, and this holds true for everyone.
“Just as working out and eating healthily can reduce your risk of heart disease, sleep can too.”
After taking into account 30 other factors – including body composition, physical activity, socioeconomic status and mental health – they found that sleep duration, in and of itself, influenced heart attack risk independently of other factors.
Prior observational research has suggested that heart health and sleep are linked but it’s been difficult to determine cause and effect – whether inadequate sleep causes heart problems or vice versa.
But in the latest study, Vetter and her co-authors analysed the medical records from 461,000 people aged 40 to 69 years old, who had never had a heart attack, as well as their genetic information and self-reported sleep habits over seven years.
Sleeping too little can affect the arteries, inflame cells as well as trigger ill-timed eating and poor dietary choices, previous research has suggested.
Too much sleep can aggravate inflammation, which is “associated with heart disease”, the study found.
Lead author of the new study Lyas Daghlas, a medical student at Harvard, said of their results: “It’s kind of a hopeful message, that regardless of what your inherited risk for heart attack is, sleeping a healthy amount may cut that risk, just like eating a healthy diet, not smoking, and other lifestyle approaches can.”
Who knows? Soon your doctor will be prescribing “sleep” as a preventative medicine. – Times Select