Catching up on sleep on weekends can reduce risk of heart disease, finds study

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Unable to sleep better on weekdays due to busy schedules? Sleeping in on weekends may not only compensate for lost sleep but may reduce your heart disease risk by one-fifth too, according to a study.

"Sufficient compensatory sleep is linked to a lower risk of heart disease. The association becomes even more pronounced among individuals who regularly experience inadequate sleep on weekdays," said study author Yanjun Song of the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease, Fuwai Hospital, Beijing, which is also the National Centre for Cardiovascular Disease.

It is generally known that those who experience sleep deprivation, "sleep in" on their days off, just to compensate for that one day they missed.

Accelerometers, a device used to measure sleep patterns, were employed by the authors to collect sleep data from 90,903 participants in the UK Biobank project in order to assess the association between compensated weekend sleep and heart disease.

The participants were divided into 4 quarters, with quarter 1 being the least compensated with sleep, and quarter 4 being the most compensated one. Individuals who self-reported getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night were considered to be suffering from sleep deprivation. 19,816 (21.8 per cent) of the individuals in total were classified as sleep-deprived. The remaining members of the cohort might have occasionally had insufficient sleep, but overall, their daily sleep hours did not satisfy the standards for sleep deprivation; the authors acknowledge this as a limitation to their findings.

It was possible to diagnose a number of cardiac conditions, such as ischemic heart disease (IHD), heart failure (HF), atrial fibrillation (AF), and stroke, using hospitalisation records and information from the cause of death registry.

"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 Zechen Liu, of the same laboratory.

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