“Sleeping in” at the weekend reduces the risk of heart attack
Good news for anyone who doesn’t get enough sleep during the week: If you make up for the lack of sleep at the weekend, you can reduce your risk of heart disease by up to 20 percent.
Balancing work, school, family and leisure is not easy. In order to meet the demands of daily life, sufficient sleep is often neglected. For many people, sleep disorders also interrupt their night’s rest.
This is not insignificant for health: restful sleep is important for physical and mental well-being. However, according to current knowledge, lack of sleep is associated with, among other things, a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
People who don’t get enough sleep during the week are known to like to catch up on sleep on their days off. However, there hasn’t been enough research to date into whether this compensatory sleep promotes heart health. The current study now sheds some light on the matter.
Lack of sleep: Less than seven hours per night
New research results presented at a congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) show that you can “catch up” on sleep at the weekend. This also has a positive effect on the risk of heart disease.
The current study shows that people who caught up on the most sleep at the weekend had a significantly lower risk of heart disease than those who caught up on little or no sleep at all.
These findings are based on data from around 90,900 adults who participated in the UK Biobank project, which records medical and lifestyle data from 500,000 people in the UK.
The researchers defined sleep deprivation as less than seven hours of sleep per night. Around 19,800 participants met this criterion.
Compensatory sleep promotes heart health – especially if you lack sleep every day
Over a follow-up period of 14 years, the researchers found that women and men who got the most sleep (up to 16 hours) on the weekends had a 19 percent lower risk of developing heart disease than those who slept the least on the weekends.
“Adequate restorative sleep is associated with a lower risk of heart disease,” says study co-author Yanjun Song of the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in Beijing.
Heart risk reduced by up to 20 percent
It’s not just people who occasionally get too little sleep during the week who benefit from a late sleeper weekend: those who are sleep deprived every day can reduce their heart risk even more by “sleeping in”. “The connection is even more pronounced in people who regularly get too little sleep on weekdays,” explains Song.
The researchers also examined a subgroup of participants with daily sleep deprivation and found that those who caught up on the most sleep at the weekend actually had a 20 percent lower risk of developing heart disease.
In the UAE
Here in the UAE life has changed in recent years such that people are working longer hours and spending more time generally community to from work. The afternoon siesta during the working week has become a thing of the past, but the weekend we can also catch up on sleep with an afternoon nap as well as having a lie-in, if the kids permit you that it.