It’s not just enough lack of sleep that affects a person’s health, a new study suggests. Having irregular sleep patterns can contribute to the risk of cardiovascular problems, according to recent evidence.
Our study indicates that healthy sleep is not only about quantity, but also variability and that this can have an important effect on heart health
Tianyi Huang
More than double the risk
Researchers analyzed data from 1,992 participants over the age of 60 and 70 without cardiovascular problems at the start of the study.
Participants were of various ethnicities, including African-Americans and Chinese Americans, and all the data came from the Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.
The team was able to map participants’ sleep patterns, as each agreed to use an actigraphy unit, a monitor for wrist activity, over a 7-day period.
This allowed researchers to get information about the bedtime, sleep duration and waking time of participants.
Researchers also had access to health monitoring information, spanning an average period of 4.9 years.
During that period, a total of 111 participants experienced different cardiovascular events, such as heart attacks and strokes.
Even after adjusting other risk factors for cardiovascular problems, the researchers saw that the association between irregular sleep patterns and cardiovascular events remained significant.
“While we also observed that irregular sleep participants tended to have worse cardiometabolic risk profiles at the start of the study, adjustment by established risk factors[enfermedad cardiovascular] (e.g., blood pressure, lipids, diabetes, etc.) only explained one small portion of the associations between sleep irregularity and risk[de enfermedad cardiovascular],” they write in their study work.
Still, the current investigation was not without limitations. The researchers explain that the cohort to which they had access was relatively small, and the follow-up time was not long enough to make the link between sleep patterns and cardiovascular risk unquestionable.
However, the team notes that if other studies confirm their findings, they will be interested in finding out if modifying a person’s sleep patterns could reduce their risk of heart and vascular problems.
Sleep regularity is a modifiable behavior. In the future, we would like to explore whether changing one’s sleep patterns at bedtime consistently each night can reduce a person’s risk of future cardiovascular events
