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Would a nap once or twice a week help you live longer?
New study reports that casual napping seems to halve the risk of heart attack, shots and cardiac disease, compared to people who never nap.
But more frequent naps would not bring any benefit, according to the researchers.
"In fact, we found that frequent diapers initially had a higher risk of cardiovascular disease incidence," said lead author Nadine Hausler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Swiss. "However, when we took sociodemography, lifestyle and cardiovascular risk factors this increased risk has disappeared. "
The results have left experts scratching their heads.
"I do not think it's decisive to know if the nap is really useful or not," said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, director of the sleep program at the Columbia Medical Center at Columbia University in New York. .
She emphasized that the health benefits of napping are a source of intense debate among researchers. Many of them claim that naps are a sign of lousy nighttime sleep and are therefore not a good thing.
"This creates a problem, because they discovered that one to two naps a week could be beneficial," St-Onge said.
For this study, the researchers examined the nap patterns of nearly 3,500 people randomly selected in Switzerland and then followed their heart health for more than five years.
About three in five said they did not take a nap. One in five say they take a nap once or twice a week, the same number of people who reported taking a nap three days or more a week.
Frequent diapers tend to be older men with excess weight and a habit of smoking. Although they reported sleep longer at night than those who do not nap, they also reported more daytime sleepiness and were more likely to have Sleep Apnea, a condition that wakes a person repeatedly in the night when his or her breathing stops.
The results showed that during the five years of follow-up, participants had 155 fatal and non-fatal cardiac events. These could include heart attacks, strokes and heart disease caused by clogged arteries requiring reopening.
A nap once or twice a week reduced the risk of having a heart attack, a stroke and heart failure by 48% compared to people who do not nap, the researchers found.
The first naps initially seemed to increase a person 's cardiac risk by 67%, but they disappear after taking into account other risk factors, noted the study' s authors.
Dr. Martha Gulati, a cardiologist and editor-in-chief of the American College of Cardiology's patient website, CardioSmart.org, said it was logical that frequent naps were a signal to patients. alarm for health problems.
"I'm afraid that someone who naps every day is not sleep well, "she said." Someone who does six or seven naps a week, I ask, are not you sleep well the night? Is this how you catch up on your sleep? "
Gulati added, "But I'm still going to take my Sunday naps and now I'm saying I'm working to reduce my risk of heart disease when my husband asks me to."
Researcher Hausler does not know exactly why one or two naps a week could be good for the body.
"The mechanisms are not simple," she said. "We assume that an occasional nap could result in a physiological compensation that reduces stress due to insufficient nighttime sleep and, as a result, could have a beneficial effect on cardiovascular disease."
Ms Hausler added: "We can say that an occasional nap can potentially reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in healthy adults," she added.
The study was published online September 9 in the journal Heart.
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