According to recent studies, “catching up” on missed sleep on weekends may considerably lower the risk of heart disease for those who find it difficult to obtain the required amount of restful sleep.
Many accumulate “sleep debt” throughout the workweek in the hopes of making up for it with more hours worked on the weekends. According to the Cleveland Clinic, sleep debt is the discrepancy between how much quality sleep we really receive and how much we require, which is at least seven hours per night.
Chinese cardiologists conducted a new analysis that was presented on Sunday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in London.
They discovered that individuals with the highest weekend sleep scores had a 19% lower risk of heart disease than those with the lowest additional sleep hours over the course of those two days.
Prior studies have demonstrated the link between bad health and insufficient sleep. On the other hand, the effects of sleeping in on the weekends on heart health have not been well studied.
The researchers examined data from 90,903 participants in the UK Biobank project. They were affiliated with the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease, Fuwai Hospital, and the National Centre for Cardiovascular Disease in Beijing.
Evaluating the link between heart disease and “compensated sleep,” which is defined as making up for sleep lost over the weekend, was the main objective.
As part of the experiment, the participants, who were selected from a sizable U.K. database collecting genetic and medical data, self-reported how much sleep they had. Approximately 25% of people met the criteria for sleep deprived people, which is fewer than seven hours of sleep every night.
Based on the amount of additional, or “compensated,” sleep each participant was able to “catch up” on during the weekend, they were split into four groups for the current study.
Through the use of hospital records and information from the cause-of-death registry, the researchers followed up with the individuals to determine if they had developed heart disease.
Participants who made up for their weekend sleep deficit by getting the maximum extra sleep, ranging from little over an hour to over 16 hours, had a 19% lower risk of developing heart disease after an average follow-up of nearly 14 years.
There are many restrictions on the study. It’s only a correlation; there’s no proof that getting more sleep on the weekends improves heart health. Furthermore, according to Dr. Muhammad Adeel Rishi, an associate professor of medicine in the Indiana University School of Medicine’s department of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine, additional factors that were not investigated could have contributed to the findings.
Furthermore, doctors caution that a significant “sleep debt” accrued during the week may not be completely reversed by sleeping an additional few hours on the weekend. A 2019 study discovered a connection between increased eating and weight gain and catch-up sleep habits.
According to Rishi, extending one’s weekend sleep can only go so far in reducing sleep debt.
According to Rishi, who was not involved in the current study, “for instance, sleeping longer over the weekend may reduce fatigue and sleepiness; however, [it] may not reduce the risk of obesity in people who are [sleep] deprived.”
According to a recent Gallup Poll, only 42% of American adults say they receive the recommended amount of sleep, while 57% think getting more would make them feel better.
