More risk of high blood pressure for those sleeping less than seven hours!

More risk of high blood pressure for those sleeping less than seven hours!
More risk of high blood pressure for those sleeping less than seven hours!

United States: According to a study by the American College of Cardiology in its Annual Scientific Sitting, people who do not sleep more than seven hours become susceptible to developing hypertension over time.

The link between sleep pattern and blood pressure – Study

While a link between sleep patterns and blood pressure has been reported, evidence on the nature of this relationship has remained inconclusive, the researchers reported.

The present analysis includes the pooled data samples from 16 studies – conducted between January 2000 and May 2023 – which analyzed hypertension incidence among 1,044,035 individuals without any history of high blood pressure in six countries and followed up to an average of 5 years (the follow-up ranged from 2.4 years to almost 18 years).

Shorter sleep duration had a significant association with developing hypertension just after regression adjustment for the demographic and the cardiovascular factors, which included age, sex, education, BMI, smoking, and blood pressure. Also, the association was seen to become stronger for those who got less than 5 hours of sleep every day.

The study concluded that the short sleepers, that is, those who slept less than seven hours, were at a 7 percent greater risk of developing high blood pressure, which escalated to 11 percent when one reported having slept less than five hours, as news-medical.net reported.

Smoking and diabetes exacerbate the impact

Visual Representation. Credit | Getty images

Kaveh Hosseini, MD, assistant professor of cardiology at the Tehran Heart Center in Iran and principal investigator of the study, said that smoking and diabetes by far have a higher impact on a person’s blood pressure, raising the chance by a minimum of 20 percent.

This study, however, is not designed to explore why it happens that disrupted sleep is likely the answer, according to Dr. Hosseini. For example, factors like unhealthy lifestyle habits, comorbid conditions such as overeating, excessive drinking, long shifts, medications, anxiety disorders, depression, sleep apnea, and other sleep problems could be the right factors.

Researchers were shocked by the fact that the relationship between the quantity of sleep and hypertension was the same regardless of age, given that sleep patterns fall into different patterns by virtue of age, as news-medical.net reported.

More about the study and revelation

The participants’ age was in the range 35.4-60.9 years and about 61 percent were females. While researchers who studied men and women who slept less than seven hours saw that women had a 7 percent higher risk of developing hypertension than the men.

Hosseini added, “Getting too little sleep appears to be riskier in females,” and “The difference is statistically significant, though we are not sure it’s clinically significant and should be further studied. What we do see is that lack of good sleep patterns may increase the risk of high blood pressure, which we know can set the stage for heart disease and stroke.”