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Sometimes, sleep can feel like a bit of a nuisance—it’s often the first thing people give up when there isn’t enough time in the day. But growing evidence suggests that not getting enough sleep doesn’t just make you tired in the morning. Over the long term, it may endanger your heart.
A new paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association adds to this research by following about a million U.S. veterans over a couple of decades, asking whether those with both insomnia and sleep apnea, where breathing is interrupted during sleep, had a higher risk of heart problems.
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Indeed, compared to people with no sleep disorders, they had more than double the risk of developing high blood pressure and more than quadruple the risk of developing heart disease. While the study can’t establish why these correlations exist, the results add to the evidence that sleep has a role in maintaining our long-term health.
Dangerous disruptions
This study draws on a vast database of medical records of post-9/11 U.S. veterans who receive health care through the Department of Veteran Affairs, or VA. This information was promising material for probing the link between sleep disorders and the heart, says Allison Gaffey, a clinical health psychologist at the Yale School of Medicine and an author of the new paper. “We know that veterans have higher rates of sleep disorders” than the general population, she says. “This is driven by a variety of factors, including deployment-related stress, irregular sleep schedules, psychiatric comorbidities such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety, and then also physical injuries and chronic pain.” What’s more, veterans also have higher rates of heart disease, raising the question of whether dealing with the sleep problems might bring those numbers down.
When the researchers ran their analysis, they were surprised by how strong the connection was between heart problems and sleep disorders. The study…
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