Aug. 29, 2023 – Getting extra sleep over the weekend could be just what your heart needs to stay healthy and strong.
About 1 in 3 people say they don’t get enough rest or sleep every day, and adults typically need between 7 and 9 hours per night. Previous research has already linked sleep problems with a range of health problems that put people at higher risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
In a new study, researchers defined sleep deprivation as regularly getting less than 7 hours per night. They compared health outcomes of 91,000 people over a 14-year period for the sleep deprived and non-sleep deprived groups. All of the people lived in the United Kingdom and provided their health information to a database called the U.K. Biobank.
People who got the most additional sleep on weekends were 19% less likely to develop heart disease than people who got the least compensatory weekend sleep. When the researchers analyzed just the group of sleep-deprived people, they found that again those who got the most compensatory weekend sleep had a similar reduced risk of heart disease (20%), compared to people who got the least extra weekend sleep. There were no differences when the team looked for outcomes between women and men.
The findings are being presented this weekend at a conference in London organized by the European Society of Cardiology.
“Our results show that for the significant proportion of the population in modern society that suffers from sleep deprivation, those who have the most ‘catch-up’ sleep at weekends have significantly lower rates of heart disease than those with the least,” said researcher Zechen Liu, of the National Centre for Cardiovascular Disease in Beijing, China, according to a news release.
