Having healthy sleep habits may be protective against cardiovascular disease, heart disease and stroke, researchers report today.
The findings, published in the European Heart Journal today (18 December), come from an analysis of data from the UK Biobank.
They apply to people with low, moderate, or high genetic risk, say the researchers.
They were led by Professor Lu Qi of Tulane University, New Orleans, USA.
The team write that “emerging evidence has implicated several unhealthy sleep behaviours were important risk factors, for example, short or long sleep duration, a predisposition to fall asleep late, insomnia, snoring, and excessive daytime sleepiness.”
They add that these sleep behaviours often go together and improvements in one can lead to improvements in another.
To look at their effect on cardiovascular disease, they analysed information on 385,292 people in the UK Biobank, placed in categories of 1-5 for sleep quality.
Over about 8.5 years there were 7,280 cases of cardiovascular disease. Those in the healthiest sleep group had a 35% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and 34% reduced risk of heart disease and stroke.
Professor Qi estimates that 10% of cardiovascular events in this group could be caused by a poor sleep pattern.
He said: “If the link between sleep and cardiovascular disease proves to be causal, then more than a tenth of all heart disease and strokes would not have occurred if all the participants had a healthy sleep score of 5.
“Among people with a healthy sleep score of 5, there were nearly seven fewer cases of cardiovascular disease per 1,000 people per year compared to those with a sleep score of less than 5. A high genetic risk could be partly offset by a healthy sleep pattern.”
Fan, M. et al. Sleep patterns, genetic susceptibility, and incident cardiovascular disease: a prospective study of 385 292 UK Biobank participants. European Heart Journal 18 December 2019; doi: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehz849
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/eurheartj/ehz849
Leave a Reply