Most of us are aware about the fact how many health risks
and serious diseases are linked to poor sleep. Those who suffer from sleep
disorders like insomnia or chronic insomnia. restlessness, seeing nightmares
and horrors while sleeping, snoring or sleep apnea have considerably higher
chances to develop chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, insufficient nutrition
and weight gain, metabolic syndrome and metabolism imbalances, elevated blood
pressure, brain function disorders, and even a few very common types of cancer.
Plenty of studies and researches related to the issue were published recently
bringing to light plenty of scientific evidence to the health risks and dangers
of chronic sleep disorders and poor sleep. The findings of one more study
carried out by a group of Norwegian experts appeared earlier this month in the
European Heart Journal, following an extensive 11-year study of the effects of
poor sleep in people’s cardiovascular health.
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology are convinced that those people who often wake up at night and can
not fall back asleep are actually at quite high risk of suffering from serious
cardiovascular problems in the future. According to the published findings,
interrupted and poor sleep are strictly linked to increased heart failure risk.
In the framework of their study, the scientists monitored sleep patterns and
health condition of over 50,000 participants aged between 20 and 89 on a
long-term basis. In the beginning of the experiment, none of the participants
was diagnosed with any sleep disorder and did not display any sing of
insufficient or poor sleep. In addition to that, none of the participants was
under the influence of other factors that could increase risks for heart
failure or other serious cardiovascular condition. As it is stated in the
report, none of the participants reported having such common symptoms of heart
problems as feeling shortness of breath or being too exhausted.
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During the study, the participants were asked to regularly
report about their possible sleep problems, and those of the volunteers who
started displaying the signs of various sleep disorders were monitored closer.
After analyzing the data collected for 11 years, it became apparent for the
scientists that those of the participants who reported disrupted sleep,
inability to fall asleep when waking up at night, and other signs of poor sleep
are three times more likely to develop such serious cardiovascular condition as
heart failure. Even when the scientists ruled out the influence of such factors
as smoking, obesity, type 2 diabetes and others, which always play a role in
developing serious cardiovascular conditions, the discovered link between poor
sleep quality and high heart failure risk remained. The researchers are
convinced that even those people who have problems when falling asleep are also
at risk for the mentioned disease.
At the same time, the scientists failed to learn about the mechanisms of the discovered link and obtain more information about the issue. “We don’t know whether insomnia truly causes heart failure. But if it does, the good thing is it is a potentially treatable condition,” said Dr Laugsand, one of the study leaders. The scientists only came up with a hypothesis that those people who suffer from poor sleep have high levels of hormones associated with stress which affect their overall health to a great extent. Many other experts underline the necessity to continue scientific work in this direction and learn more about the connections between poor sleep and elevated heart failure risk. If you want to get more info about this interesting research, you can check out the relevant report about this study in one of the latest issues of the European Heart Journal
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