Irregular sleep may be harmful to your heart, study finds

When you don’t get enough good sleep, the short-term consequences are noticeable; maybe you’re distracted at work or snappy with loved ones. But in the background, irregular and poor-quality sleeping patterns could increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a study in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

 

“This study is one of the first investigations to provide evidence of a connection between irregular sleep duration and irregular sleep timing and atherosclerosis,” said lead author Kelsie Full, an assistant professor of medicine in the epidemiology division at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

 

Atherosclerosis is the buildup of plaque in arteries, according to the American Heart Association. This plaque is made up of cholesterol, fatty substances, cellular waste products, calcium and fibrin – a clotting agent in the blood. As plaque accumulates, blood vessel walls thicken, which reduces blood flow and therefore diminishes the amount of oxygen and other nutrients reaching the rest of the body. Atherosclerosis can lead to cardiovascular health conditions, including coronary heart disease, angina, heart attacks, strokes and carotid or peripheral artery disease.

 

Poor sleep – including poor-quality, abnormal-quantity and fragmented sleep – has been linked with cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular disease-related deaths before, but less had been known about the specific associations between sleep regularity and atherosclerosis.

 

Sleep regularity, the new study’s authors defined, is estimated by variations in sleep duration (how long someone sleeps each night) and sleep timing (the time when someone falls asleep nightly). The fewer variations, the better.