IIf you're like most Americans, you not getting enough sleep. And this causes damage to the body, especially the heart. Poor sleep was associated with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, inflammation, heart attack and more.
One of the solutions: catch up on lost sleep whenever you can, especially on weekends. But while this may help you feel more rested, can it really reverse the heart damage that comes from not getting enough sleep at work? According to new research will be presented at the meeting on September 1 European Society of Cardiologyit could be.
The results were obtained from an analysis of nearly 91,000 people included in the study. UK Biobank Projectlarge-scale biomedical database. People reported how much sleep they got each night, and those who slept less than seven hours on average — about 22 percent of the sample — were considered sleep-deprived. Study participants wore sleep-tracking devices for a period of time, which allowed researchers to measure how much extra sleep they got over the weekend. The researchers then followed the participants’ cardiovascular health 14 years later.
Read more: Hugs can help you sleep better
People who were sleep-deprived and got the most compensatory sleep on weekends (sleeping at least 90 minutes more than they usually did during the week) had about a 20% lower risk of various diseases, including heart failure, atrial fibrillation, coronary heart disease, and stroke, than people who slept the least on weekends.
Sleeping in on the weekends can have these consequences several ways. During sleep, your heart rate slows and your blood pressure can drop by 10 to 20 percent, a phenomenon known as the nocturnal dip. Poor sleep can also lead to chronic inflammation, which contributes to plaque buildup, and catching up on sleep can help alleviate this. In accordance with Adults who sleep less than five hours a night have a 200 to 300 percent increased risk of coronary artery calcification, according to the University of Chicago School of Medicine. Type 2 diabetes and obesity are also associated with lack of sleep, which puts additional strain on the heart.
“Our results show that among a large proportion of the modern population suffering from sleep deprivation, those who get the most sleep on weekends have significantly lower rates of heart disease than those who get the least,” said study co-author Zechen Liu of the Beijing National Cardiovascular Center.