Too much and too little sleep increases the risk of heart attack

A new study of nearly half a million participants showed strikingly that sleep duration plays a crucial role in a person's risk of heart attack, even if they exercise, smoke or no genetic predisposition to live. heart disease. Researchers have found that too much sleep, as well as too little sleep, increases the risk of heart attack.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Manchester analyzed a dataset of 461,000 people aged 40 to 69, belonging to the British biobank, who did not have an antecedent of heart attack or heart disease. The state of health of the participants was monitored over a period of seven years.

Those who slept less than six hours a night were 20% more likely to have a heart attack than those who slept 6 to 9 hours.

The fact that sleep deprivation and poor sleep are linked to negative health outcomes is not surprising. One study after study found a link between sleep deprivation, anxiety, depression, obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

But what was surprising in this study was that people who slept more than nine hours a night were 34% more likely to have a heart attack than participants sleeping 6 to 9 hours – which poses a significant risk higher than people deprived of sleep.

The more remote people are out of the range of 6 to 9 hours, the higher the recorded risk of heart attack. People who slept only 5 hours had a 52% chance of having a heart attack, while those who slept 10 hours were twice as likely to have someone who slept normally.

Surprisingly, these effects remained true even taking into account more than 30 other factors, including physical activity, mental health and socio-economic status. In other words, sleep duration influenced the risk of heart attack independently of other lifestyle-related factors – and genes were no exception to the rule.

"This gives us even more certainty that there is a cause-and-effect relationship here – that it is the duration of sleep, and not something else, that influences the heart's health," said Celine Vetter , co-author of the new study and assistant professor of physiology at the university. from Colorado Boulder.

It is not clear why sleep duration is such an important factor in heart disease. Some explanations suggest that sleeping too little can affect the arteries, bone marrow, as well as lead to poor lifestyle choices, such as eating poor quality foods. On the other hand, sleeping too much can increase inflammation in the body.

There is good news, however. The study suggests that sleeping for a reasonable number of hours can be one of the most important things you can do to prevent heart disease.

"It's kind of a hopeful message that, no matter how much risk you inherit from a heart attack, getting enough sleep to sleep can reduce that risk, as does eating healthy, not smoking, and other approaches." of the way of life can do it, "said lead author Iyas Daghlas. , who is a medical student at Harvard.

"Just like working and eating healthy can reduce your risk of heart disease, sleep can also," said Vetter.

The study was published in Journal of the American College of Cardiology.