Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Sleep Adequately to Prevent Heart Disease!

If a person reduces his or her sleep duration, then his or her risk of getting heart disease would be higher.

A recent study indicated that sleeping less than 7.5 hours a night would increase the chance of cardiovascular risk, including heart attack and stroke, by 33 percent. The paper was published by researchers from Jichi Medical University on November 12, 2008 in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Archives of Internal Medicine.

The sleep of 1,255 people with hypertension (also known as high blood pressure) was monitored by the Japanese researchers for an average period of 50 months. Their daytime and nighttime blood pressure, sleep duration, and cardiovascular disease events like heart attack, stroke and sudden cardiac death were tracked.

In the study, there were 99 incidents of cardiovascular disease being recorded. It was also found that the rate for people who slept less than 7.5 hours was 2.4 per 100 person-years. Those who slept more had a lower incident rate of 1.8 per 100 person-years. Meanwhile, the researchers also discovered that people whose blood pressure rose at night were more prone to heart disease.

The researchers believed that shorter duration of sleep is actually a predictor of incident cardiovascular disease in elderly individuals with hypertension.

In the meantime, inadequate sleep has also been linked to higher chances of diabetes, obesity and several risk factors for cardiovascular disease, which includes nighttime hypertension and sleep-disordered breathing.

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