Poor sleep can compromise your heart health

Poor sleep could lead to between two and seven years’ worth of heightened heart disease risk and even premature death, according to researchers at the Universities of Sydney and Southern Denmark. Their study analysed data from over 300,000 middle-aged adults from the UK Biobank and found that different disturbances to sleep are associated with different durations of compromised cardiovascular health later in life compared to healthy sleepers.

Men with clinical sleep-related breathing disorders lost nearly seven years of cardiovascular disease-free life compared to those without these conditions, and women lost over seven years. Even general poor sleep, such as insufficient sleep, insomnia complaints, snoring, going to bed late and daytime sleepiness, was associated with a loss of around two years of normal heart health in men and women. The results were published in the journal BMC Medicine.

“Anyone who’s had a few rough nights of sleep knows how it can lead to bad mood and not feeling one’s best,” said senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis, from Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. “Our research shows that, over time, regular poor sleep can lead to significantly compromised cardiovascular health in middle and old age.

“Sleep apnoea is well known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and other chronic conditions, but these findings are a wake-up call that poor sleep in general can pose significant risk to heart health.”

The team used an established composite sleep score comprising self-reported sleep duration, insomnia complaints, snoring, daytime sleepiness and whether the person was a night owl or an early bird to come up with three sleep categories — poor, intermediate and healthy at age 40 — and compared this with their overall cardiovascular disease-free health expectancy. By combining the study participants’ self-reported data with clinical data from their doctors in the two years preceding the study, the researchers were able to compare health outcomes for self-reported sleep patterns and clinically diagnosed conditions such as sleep-related breathing disorders.

Women with poor sleep were likely to experience two years more of compromised cardiovascular health compared to healthy sleepers, while men experienced more than two years. Intermediate sleepers lost almost one year of heart disease-free life among women, and men lost slightly more. This means that snoring and trouble falling asleep or staying asleep can be a warning sign of potential health issues in the future.

“While the average life expectancy of the UK study participants is around 80 years, people with clinically diagnosed sleep-related breathing disorders like sleep apnoea lost over seven years of cardiovascular disease-free life,” said lead author Dr Bo-Huei Huang, an epidemiologist who recently graduated from the Charles Perkins Centre.

Professor Peter Cistulli, the ResMed Chair of Sleep Medicine at the Charles Perkins Centre and Royal North Shore Hospital, said the findings are significant because they extend the findings of previous studies linking poor sleep to important health outcomes.

“Sleep is a vital biological function that has been underappreciated in public health policy to date,” Cistulli said. “It’s gratifying that these findings shine a light on the importance of sleep and the need for it to be recognised as a pillar of good health, alongside physical activity and nutrition.”

Image credit: iStock.com/Tero Vesalainen