Catching up on sleep could lower your risk of heart disease by as much as 20%.
Good news for fans of a lie-in after a busy working week.
Your Back Page scribe has always been pretty consistent with their sleeping patterns – early to bed, early to rise and rarely needing to catch up on sleep on the weekend.
This is a strong contrast to my wife, who works in healthcare, and was convinced that when we first started seeing each other she would teach me the art of sleeping in. Much to her dismay, the opposite happened – I “destroyed” her ability to catch some extra Zs.
But new research from a team at the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease, part of the Fuwai Hospital’s National Centre for Cardiovascular Disease in China, has me thinking my approach to sleep has been all wrong, and potentially gives my wife a scientifically proven “I told you so” card.
In their study, presented at the recent European Society for Cardiology congress in London, the researchers claiming that catching up on sleep over the weekend could reduce your risk of heart disease by up to 20%.
This was a particularly chilling realisation for someone with an extensive family history of heart disease (as well as cancer, dementia and pretty much anything else you can think of).
Researchers examined data from over 90,000 participants in the UK Biobank project, where sleep patterns were tracked using accelerometers. Cardiac disease outcomes such as stroke, atrial fibrillation and ischaemic heart disease were assessed using hospitalisation records and cause of death information over a median follow-up period of 14 years.
Participants were split into four relatively even groups based on how their sleep patterns changed on the weekend relative to during the week. Individuals in quartile 1 were the least sleep-compensated, getting between 0.3 and 16.1 hours less sleep on the weekend, while their pals in quartile 4 were sleeping in for an extra 1.3 to 16.1 hours.
After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that people in quartile 4 were 19% less likely to develop heart disease than people in quartile 1.
This association was independent of other genetic risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
A similar association was found in the 22% of patients who self-reported as being sleep deprived (getting less than seven hours of sleep per night): people in quartile 4 had a 20% lower risk of developing heart disease than people in quartile 1.
Turns out my wife might have been on to something after all.
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