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A night of bad sleep here and there will probably not do you much harm, except make you a little tired and grumpy the next day. But an increasing number of studies confirm that chronic poor sleep has more serious costs.
For example, systematically sleeping less than the recommended seven or eight hours is related to a higher risk of cardiovascular problems – such as heart attack, stroke and death.
We do not know why, even though new American research suggests that sleep quality affects blood pressure.
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"There are many works demonstrating that sleep has an impact on mortality and cardiovascular disease," said Caroline Doyle, the lead author of the study, a graduate student in the psychology department of the University of Toronto. 39, University of Arizona, in a report.
"We wanted to see if we could try to get some of that history – how sleep could have an impact on diseases due to high blood pressure."
Doyle and a team of researchers recruited 300 healthy men and women, ages 21 to 70, enrolled in the North Texas Heart Study.
For two consecutive days, participants wore portable armbands that automatically took their blood pressure every 45 minutes.
While they slept, participants also wore actigraphs – small devices that detect movement – to calculate their "sleep efficiency," a measure of how much time was spent sleeping properly.
The study, published in Psychosomatic medicine, determined that poor sleep efficiency was related to high blood pressure during the night. It was also badociated with high blood pressure the next day, particularly at systolic blood pressure – pressure exerted by the heart that squeezes blood around the body, marked by the first or first digit of the blood pressure reading.
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The study does not explain How sleep may raise or lower blood pressure, but Doyle explained that this finding helped shed light on the link between poor sleep quality and cardiovascular disease.
"Blood pressure is one of the best predictors of cardiovascular health," said Doyle.
She called on scientists to deepen their research into the long-term effects of poor sleep on health and to improve the sleep quality of ordinary people.
"It's another study that shows that something is happening with sleep and the health of our heart," she said. "Sleep is important, so whatever you can do to improve your sleep, it's worth giving priority."
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