U.S. researchers announced on Tuesday that an extra hour of sleep a day lowers the possibility of calcium deposits in the arteries, a forerunner to heart disease.
The discovery contributes to the list of health outcomes, like weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure.
“We found that people who on average slept longer were at reduced risk of developing new coronary artery calcifications over five years,” said Diane Lauderdale of the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“It was surprisingly strong,” said Lauderdale. Calcium deposits in the coronary arteries are a warning of heart disease. “It’s a very early marker of future risk,” she said.
Contrasting other studies, Lauderdale’s team measured specific sleep patterns instead of taking a written survey.
They fitted a wristband on 495 people aged 35 to 47 that noted delicate body movements. Data is put into a computer program that detected specific sleep patterns.
The team took CT scans to evaluate the buildup of calcium in heart arteries, taking one scan at the beginning of the examination and one five years after.
The team noted that sleep length played an important part in the development of coronary artery calcification.
12 percent of the people in the study had artery calcification develop in the five-year study. In those who had less than five hours, 27 percent had artery calcification.
That decreased to 11 percent in those who had five to seven hours, and 6 percent in those who had seven hours a night.
Lauderdale said it unclear why this difference happened in those who slept less, but had some premises. Since blood pressure falls off while you are sleeping, it might be that those who had more sleep saw lower blood pressure in a 24-hour period.
“It’s something of a mystery,” Lauderdale said.
Kathy Parker, a sleep researcher from the University of Rochester’s School of Nursing in New York, stated that the investigation emphasizes the importance of sleep.
“People think that sleep doesn’t matter but clearly it does. Sleep deprivation is a public health problem and studies such as this show how increasing sleep duration can have tremendously positive effects,” Parker said.
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