In a way, it’s the most effortless thing we can do.
According to a new study in the journal BMC Medicine, it’s one of the most effective ways to prevent a heart attack.
Most of us don’t do enough of this easy, pleasurable activity.
Researchers from the University of Sydney and Southern Denmark University knew that poor sleep had negative effects on our heart health, but they wanted to know exactly how many years of heart disease it added to our lives.
They examined the records of 308,683 middle-aged adults from the UK Biobank, out of which primary care data were available for 140,181.
They estimated sleep quality in two ways.
First, they used a well-established composite sleep score that considers various factors, such as self-reported chronotype, duration, insomnia complaints, snoring, and daytime sleepiness, to categorize participants into three sleep categories: poor, intermediate, and healthy.
Second, they used primary care data to identify people with sleep disorders diagnosed during the two years before the study. These included insomnia and sleep-breathing disorders like sleep apnea.
Then they compared the health outcomes of the good, intermediate, and poor sleepers and discovered some interesting results.
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1. Compared with healthy sleepers, poor female sleepers lost 1.8 years of cardiovascular disease-free (CVD-free) life, and poor male sleepers lost 2.31 years.
2. Compared with healthy sleepers, intermediate female sleepers lost 0.48 years of CVD-free life, and poor male sleepers lost 0.55 years.
3. Insomnia decreased CVD-free lifespan by 3.84 years for men but not for women.
4. Sleep-related breathing disorders decreased CVD-free lifespan by 6.73 years for men and 7.32 years for women.
5. Women lost 1.43 years of CVD-free life to other, unspecified other sleep disorders, but these did not have a measurable effect on the CVD-free lifespan of men.
Sleep apnea poses the worst heart disease risk of any sleep disturbance, followed by insomnia for men, followed by general poor sleep.
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