Did you know that Sleeping less than six hours a night may increase your risk of heart attack or stroke?
Researchers say getting less than six hours of shut-eye increased the risk of cardiovascular disease by up to 35 per cent compared to those who slept between seven and eight hours a night.
Lack of sleep raises the risk of atherosclerosis, which is a build-up of plaque in the body’s arteries that causes them to narrow and harden.
The team, led by the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) in Madrid, says the findings show that changing patterns of sleep could be faster and cheaper than treating heart disease with certain drugs.
For the study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the team looked at nearly 4,000 bank employees in Spain.
The participants were 46 years old on average with no known history of heart disease from the CNIC-Santander PESA study, which looks at how cardiovascular disease advances.
To measure sleep, they wore an actigraph – a watch-like device that continuously measures movement and light exposure – over seven days.
Researchers split the participants into four groups: less than six hours of sleep, six to seven hours of sleep, seven to eight hours of sleep, and eight hours or more of sleep.
The adults were also given 3-D heart ultrasounds and CT scans to look for evidence of cardiovascular disease.
Lastly, the team looked at quality of sleep, which was measured by how often someone woke up in the middle of the night and how often they moved in their sleep.
Participants who slept less than six hours every night were 27 per cent more likely to have atherosclerosis than those who slept seven to eight hours every night.
Additionally, participants with poor quality of sleep were 34 per cent more likely to have the disease that participants with good quality of sleep.
There was also an association between those who slept more than eight hours a night and atherosclerosis risk.
Researchers found that particularly women who slept that long every night were more likely to have it.