For the majority of us, sleep is a time to rejuvenate and take stock of the day so that we can wake up with more energy and a new perspective. Yet for millions of individuals, going to bed might bring up a plethora of unrecognized health issues.

A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Sydney and Southern Denmark University found that not getting enough sleep could increase the risk of heart disease by two to seven years and even cause early death.

The study looked at data from the UK Biobank on more than 300,000 middle-aged adults and found that different types of sleep disturbances are linked to different lengths of poor cardiovascular health later in life, compared to people who sleep well.

Men who suffer from clinical sleep-related breathing disorders have been found to lose almost seven years of life free from cardiovascular disease in comparison to those who do not have such conditions. Similarly, women with clinical sleep-related breathing disorders lose over seven years of cardiovascular disease-free life.

Moreover, even general bad sleep habits including inadequate sleep, complaints of insomnia, snoring, going to bed late, and daytime drowsiness are linked to a loss of two years’ worth of healthy cardiac function in both men and women.

Senior author Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis stated that having a few bad nights of sleep can lead to a bad mood and feeling unwell. However, their research has revealed that “regular poor sleep” over time can lead to a compromised cardiovascular system during middle and old age. 

While it’s widely known that “sleep apnea” increases the “risk of cardiovascular disease” and other chronic illnesses, these findings serve as a warning that “poor sleep, in general, can pose significant risk to heart health.”

After taking into account factors such as self-reported sleep duration, insomnia complaints, snoring, daytime sleepiness, and whether or not a person was a night owl or an early bird, the research team determined three sleep categories: poor, intermediate, and healthy at age 40, and compared these to the likelihood of the individual being free of cardiovascular disease.

By putting together the self-reported data from the study participants and the clinical data from their doctors from the two years before the study, the researchers were able to compare the health outcomes of self-reported sleeping habits and clinically diagnosed conditions like sleep-related breathing disorders.

Around age 40, the researchers classified the subjects as either poor, moderate, or healthy sleepers, and then examined the patients’ health again later in life.

Poor sleepers, both men and women, were more than twice as likely to have cardiovascular problems as those who got enough sleep. In women, those who slept in an intermediate position lost about one year of life free from heart disease; in males, the loss was somewhat greater.

This implies that snoring and other sleep problems, such as difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep, may serve as an early indicator of more serious health problems.

According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Bo-Huei Huang, an epidemiologist who recently received her doctorate from the Charles Perkins Center and Faculty of Medicine and Health, “people with clinically diagnosed sleep-related breathing disorders like sleep apnea lost over seven years of cardiovascular-disease free life,” despite the average life expectancy of the UK study participants being around 80 years.

Source: 10.1186/s12916-023-02732-x

Image Credit: Getty