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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Sleep Extra to Prevent Heart Disease! Previous findings have shown that if a person sleeps too little, a list of health issues including high blood pressure, diabetes, and weight gain can simply emerge. A paper, published on December 23, 2008 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reported that the risk of developing calcium deposits in the arteries would be lower if a person can have just one extra hour of sleep a day. Researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center, who were in charge of the study, found that people who had a longer sleep duration on average would have a lower risk of developing new coronary artery calcifications over 5 years. In fact, calcium deposits in the coronary arteries are considered a precursor of future heart disease. It is seen as a very early marker of future risk. Instead of looking at the risk of getting too little sleep with people’s own estimates, the new study adopted a different approach by recording the actual sleep patterns. The study involved 495 people aged between 35 and 47, who were fitted with sophisticated wrist bands that tracked subtle body movements. Information from these recorders was fed into computer program that analyzed and detected the actual sleep patterns.
In order to assess the buildup of calcium inside heart arteries, the participants were scanned once at the outset of the study and another one 5 years later using a special computed tomography (or CT) scans. After the necessary adjustments on other differences like age, gender, race, education, smoking and risk for sleep apnea, the researchers found that the development of coronary artery calcification was greatly influenced by the sleep duration. During the 5-year study, about 12 percent of the participants developed artery calcification. For those who had slept less than 5 hours a night, 27 percent of them had developed artery calcification. Among those who slept 5 to 7 hours, there was only 11 percent got artery calcification and this dropped to 6 percent among those who slept more than 7 hours a night. The actual reason behind the differences occurred in people who slept less were still not clear, but the researchers did have their own explanation. They felt that people who slept longer had lower blood pressure over a period of 24 hours because blood pressure tends to be lower during sleep. Or, it could due to the fact that exposure to stress hormone cortisol, which is reduced during sleep, was lower. Alternatively, there might be some unidentified processes that caused such phenomenon. Indeed, the study strongly indicated that sleep plays an important role in health, against the belief harbored by many people that sleep does not matter. In today’s modern living, sleep deprivation is already a public health problem and this new study shows how longer sleep duration can have tremendously positive effects on health. There is no doubt that the findings should still be confirmed by others, but many other studies have already shown that at least 6 hours of sleep a night is essential for the sake of health. While awaiting confirmations from other researchers, perhaps we should start increasing our sleep duration just for the sake of heart disease prevention.
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