Harvard study of 400,000 people: Sleepless heart Crash! Achieving these 5 points reduces the risk of heart failure by 42%

Do you think staying up late can only hurt your liver? A recent study published in Circulation, the official journal of the American Heart Association (AHA), found that staying up late can be harmful to heart failure. If you could change five bad sleep habits, you could reduce your risk of heart failure by 42 percent.

Heart failure, the condition in which the heart cannot pump enough blood per minute to meet the body’s normal demand for oxygen and nutrients, is the final stage of serious heart disease. More than 26 million people worldwide suffer from heart failure, and the number of those affected is growing. Although drug treatments can help people cope with the disease, the side effects can also destroy the patient’s health.

Researchers from Tulane University in New Orleans, Harvard University’s THChan School of Public Health and others have found that sleep problems may play a role in the development of heart failure. Those who slept best had a 42 per cent lower risk of heart failure compared with those who slept unhealthily.

When 400,000 people were followed for 10 years, the best sleepers had a 42 percent lower risk of heart failure

Between 2006 and 2010, researchers surveyed 408,802 participants aged 37 to 73 with symptoms of unintentional failure in the British Biobanks to gather information about their sleep behavior and quality. During an average of 10.1 years of follow-up, a total of 5,221 cases of heart failure occurred.

The researchers analyzed the data and rated the sleep quality of the participants based on five factors: biological clock, sleep duration, insomnia, snoring and excessive daytime sleepiness. The healthiest sleep was defined as waking early, sleeping seven to eight hours a day, having almost no insomnia, no snoring and rarely excessive daytime sleepiness, with a point added for each condition.

Overall, the researchers found a negative correlation between healthy sleep scores and the incidence of heart failure. For every one-point increase in a healthy sleep score, the risk of heart failure was reduced by 15 percent. Those who slept the best had a 42 percent lower risk of exhaustion than those who slept the worst.

In addition, the researchers found that the risk of heart failure was independently associated with an 8 percent, 12 percent, 17 percent and 34 percent lower risk of heart failure, respectively, of waking up early, getting seven to eight hours of sleep, having little insomnia and not sleepiness during the day. This provides a new direction for reversing heart failure.

Congenital cardiovascular disease can also be saved by sleeping well

In fact, researchers published a paper in The European Heart Journal in 2019. Using the same method for the first time to assess the effects of sleep patterns and cardiovascular risk, adults who slept the best were found to have a 35 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 34 percent lower risk of heart attack and stroke, compared with those who slept the worst

What’s more, studies have shown that even if you have a high genetic risk of cardiovascular disease, healthy sleep can partially negate that risk, meaning that even if you are born with a bad condition, you still have a chance to improve.