- Researchers are reporting that the fewer hours a person sleeps, the higher their risk of high blood pressure.
- Evidence linking less sleep to hypertension isn’t new, but conclusions have been inconsistent in the past.
- The risk of high blood pressure is greater in women who sleep less.
Sleeping fewer than 7 hours a night is associated with a higher risk of
The findings, which haven’t been published yet in a peer-reviewed journal, are being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session.
The study authors acknowledged the association between sleep patterns and high blood pressure, also known as hypertension, isn’t necessarily a revelation.
However, they said evidence of the connection has been inconsistent in the past.
The researchers looked at data from 16 studies done between January 2000 and May 2023.
The information involved incidences of hypertension in 1,044,035 people in six countries who didn’t have a history of high blood pressure over follow-up periods ranging from 2 to 18 years (with a median of 5 years).
The researchers reported that those sleeping for shorter periods had a significantly higher risk of developing hypertension, even after adjusting for demographic and cardiovascular risk factors that included smoking, blood pressure, body mass, education, gender, and age.
The association was even stronger for people getting fewer than five hours of sleep.
“Based on the most updated data, the less you sleep — that is less than seven hours a day — the more likely you will develop high blood pressure in the future,” said Dr. Kaveh Hosseini, the study’s principal investigator and an assistant professor of cardiology at the Tehran Heart Center in Iran, in a statement. “We saw a trend between longer sleep durations and a greater occurrence of high blood pressure, but it was not statistically significant. Getting seven to eight hours of sleep, as is recommended…
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