People who “make up” for their sleep deprivation during the week by sleeping extra on weekends may see their risk of heart disease cut by up to a fifth, a new study has found.
This good news was presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress on August 29, 2024, held in London, UK, and the study was written about by Science Daily.
lack of sleep
Sometimes a week of hard work or exams requires a reduction in sleep hours or a change in sleep schedule, which leads to sleep deprivation in individuals. It is known that those who suffer from sleep deprivation sleep extra hours on their days off to mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation.
The researchers used data from 90,903 people who participated in the UK Biobank project, a large-scale biomedical database and research resource that enables new scientific discoveries that improve public health by making large sets of patient data available in a non-intrusive way.
To assess the relationship between weekend catch-up sleep and heart disease, sleep data were recorded and divided into four approximate groups from least catch-up sleep to most catch-up sleep.
The researchers defined people who reported sleeping less than 7 hours per night as having poor sleep. A total of 19,816 people (21.8%) of the participants were defined as having poor sleep. The remaining participants had occasional poor sleep, but their average daily sleep hours did not meet the criteria for poor sleep.
Heart disease
Hospital records and cause of death registry information were used to diagnose various heart diseases including ischemic heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke.
At a median follow-up of about 14 years, participants in the group who got the most catch-up sleep were 19% less likely to develop heart disease than those who got the least catch-up sleep. Analyses showed no differences between men and women.
“Our results show that for a large portion of the population in modern society who suffer from sleep deprivation, those who get the most catch-up sleep on weekends have significantly lower rates of heart disease compared to those who get the least catch-up sleep,” said study co-author Zhishen Liu, of the National Key Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, Fuwai Hospital, and the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in Beijing.