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Poor Sleep Linked to Cardiovascular Disease

Another worrying thing to keep you up at night: new study finds connection between lack of rest and
atherosclerosis

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 This research “provides new approaches to identify people at risk before its clinical manifestation and before it is detected by current clinical tests,” said José Ordovás.
Photo: iStock

By Jacqueline Clark
March 20, 2019

If you’ve spoken with your doctor about protecting your heart health, you likely received advice about
eating well and starting an exercise routine. But a recent study suggests there’s another way to help:
get a good night’s sleep.

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 Previous research has suggested a link between poor sleep and health problems like high blood
pressure, diabetes, and stroke. Detecting the link between sleep and those diseases, though, has been
complicated by the fact that most studies are retrospective—they ask patients who are already
diagnosed with a disease to report their sleep habits, so the results are susceptible to errors in reddit
memory.

This is especially problematic since people routinely report sleeping more than they actually do, and
cannot reliably report their sleep quality. Print Email

The new study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, remedied that
shortcoming by recruiting only clinically healthy participants. They wore sensors that measured how
long they slept and how many times they moved or woke up during the night.

The researchers then examined each patient for early signs of cardiovascular disease, performing 3D ultrasounds to measure the amount of
harmful plaque buildup in the arteries—called atherosclerosis—they had in their necks and thighs. Atherosclerosis is an early marker for heart
disease and a risk factor for heart attacks, and measuring it in multiple sites can help to detect it early.

The researchers found that the participants who slept the least also had the most plaque in their arteries. This was true even when other risk
factors like obesity, smoking, and medical history were taken into account.

José Ordovás, director of the Nutrition and Genomics Lab at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts and
one of the study’s senior authors, said that this research “provides new approaches to identify people at risk before its clinical manifestation and
before it is detected by current clinical tests.”

The finding is cause for concern, because most of us aren’t getting enough sleep. In the study, which included 3,974 participants, 65 percent of
people were categorized has having a “short sleep duration” or a “very short sleep duration.”

“Lack of sleep is the elephant in the room,” said Ordovás, who is also a professor at the Friedman School. “It is there, but most people don’t talk
about it, even though most people suffer from it and every year it grows in larger proportions.”

This was the first study to use objective sleep measurements and advanced imaging techniques to look for a link between sleep and
atherosclerosis in healthy patients without sleep disorders like apnea; the researchers hope that more work like it may lead to better
preventative care.

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 The same participants will be measured again over a period of years, and the long-term data will help researchers to understand how
atherosclerosis progresses over time and better understand the risk factors for heart disease.

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