To conduct the study, the experts recorded sleep data from 90,903 people from the UK Biobank, which they divided into four groups based on hours of lost sleep that they made up for later.
They defined as “sleep deprivation” sleeping less than seven hours a night and, based on participants’ own reports, they considered 19,816 of them (21.8%) to be in this category. The rest may have experienced occasional insufficient sleep, but on average, their daily sleep hours did not meet the criteria for sleep deprivation.
Hospitalization records and cause of death registry information were used to diagnose various heart diseasesincluding ischemic heart disease (IHD), heart failure (HF), atrial fibrillation (AF) and stroke.
After a period of followed for almost 14 yearsparticipants in the group with more compensatory sleep, that is, those who They took more advantage of Saturday and Sunday to catch up on lost sleep.they had a 19 percent lower risk of developing heart disease compared to the group that slept the least over the weekend. In the subgroup of patients with daily sleep deprivation, those who received more compensatory sleep had a 20% lower risk of developing heart disease than those who received less. The analysis showed no differences between men and women.
Catching up on sleep on weekends reduces risk of cardiovascular disease
Thus, study co-author Yanjun Song, from the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, Fuwai Hospital, National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in Beijing, China, stressed that this Association between compensatory sleep and lower risk of heart disease This becomes even more pronounced in people who usually sleep poorly during the week.
“Our results show that for the significant proportion of the population in modern society who suffer from sleep deprivation, Those who sleep more on weekends have significantly lower rates of heart disease than those with less,” concluded study co-author Zechen Liu, also of the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at Fuwai Hospital, National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in Beijing.
