Sleeping well reduces the risk of heart failure by 42%

By involving analysis of data from nearly half a million British subjects, this new observational study suggests that healthy sleep patterns are significantly associated with lower rates of heart failure.

A significant correlation

In recent years, a lot of research has been done on the relationship between poor quality sleep and various diseases. Most of these studies focus on the potential health implications of specific sleep behaviors, such as overall sleep duration or the impact of sleep deprivation. As part of this new work, presented in the magazine Circulation, the researchers specifically investigated their relationship to heart failure risk.

To do this, the team looked at data from 408,802 adult UK subjects who had been followed for ten years and assigned each of them an overall sleep quality score based on five specific measures: sleep duration, insomnia. , snoring, daytime sleepiness and chronotype (morning, night owl, etc.).

It was found that the subjects with the highest scores were 42% less likely to have an episode of heart failure than those with the lowest score. This risk reduction rate was calculated after adjusting for a number of other factors known to influence coronary heart disease, including genetic variation, diabetes and hypertension.

Looking at the different measures considered individually, the researchers found that early risers and subjects who reported sleeping between 7 and 8 hours a day had an 8% and 12% lower risk of heart failure, respectively. The mere absence of sleep disturbances resulted in a 17% reduction in risk, while subjects who did not report daytime sleepiness were 34% less likely to suffer from this type of sleep disturbance.

Better understand the influence of sleep on health

” Sleep habits are related. The human body regulates the latter in a holistic way in order to maintain an overall consistency in its intensity, quality and duration. Write the authors of the study. ” By jointly evaluating these behaviors, our study echoes the findings highlighted by previous research. “

This new work, of course, runs up against the same limitations as most observational studies. Sleep habits and behaviors are self-reported, often resulting in recall bias, while it is not possible to explicitly establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between these types of behaviors and heart failure. However, such findings help deepen our understanding of the influence of sleep on health, highlighting more variables that can affect it.