While it’s well known that exercise, healthy eating and managing things such as high blood pressure and cholesterol are crucial for your heart health, it turns out your sleep habits play a big role, too.
A recent study of 2,032 people published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that poor sleep or not enough sleep led to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, including atherosclerosis ― an issue where plaque causes the arteries to harden or thicken.
The study looked at people with obstructed sleep apnea, people with fragmented sleep and people with short sleep duration. Participants wore a wrist tracker for seven days to measure their sleep and completed a sleep journal; the study also measured their heart rate, breathing and sleep stages.
People who had irregular sleep ― which means sleep that varied by 90 minutes to 2 hours each week ― were 1.4 times more likely to have high coronary artery calcium scores, which is the amount of plaque in your arteries.
The study underscored data found by other recent sleep-and-heart research, according to Dr. Manesh R. Patel, the chief of the division of cardiology and the division of clinical pharmacology at Duke University School of Medicine.
Patel said that other studies have explored this topic and also found that low-quality sleep (like waking up frequently in the night) or not getting enough sleep can put folks at risk for other cardiovascular conditions beyond atherosclerosis. This includes high blood pressure and irregular heart rhythms, Patel noted.
What do these findings about sleep mean for you?
Unfortunately, even just short durations of poor sleep can impact your heart health.
Dr. Virend Somers, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, recently led a randomized controlled study that focused on sleep deprivation and its impact on high blood pressure. The study was made up of healthy young people.
“We looked at their blood pressure and their sympathetic nervous system … over 24 hours,” he explained. When study participants were sleep-deprived (in this case, researchers reported they got four hours of sleep a night for nine days), their blood pressure went up both during the daytime and when they were asleep. These results were more common in women than men, Somers said, which surprised researchers.
“When they’re sleep deprived … the endothelial function — the ability for their blood vessels to dilate — was also impaired,” Somers explained. The inability of blood vessels to…
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