नवीनतम
Getting good sleep could add years to your life: Research
NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: According to recent research being presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session Along With the World Congress of Cardiology, getting enough sleep can boost your heart and general health--and possibly even how long you live. According to the study, young people who sleep better had a somewhat lower risk of dying young. Furthermore, the statistics imply that irregular sleep habits may account for around 8 per cent of deaths from any cause.
"We saw a clear dose-response relationship, so the more beneficial factors someone has in terms of having a higher quality of sleep, they also have a stepwise lowering of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality," said Frank Qian, MD, an internal medicine resident physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the study. "I think these findings emphasize that just getting enough hours of sleep isn't sufficient. You really have to have restful sleep and not have much trouble falling and staying asleep."
For their analysis, Qian and the team included data from 172,321 people (average age 50 and 54 per cent women) who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 2013 and 2018. This survey is fielded each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Center for Health Statistics to help gauge the health of the U.S. population and includes questions about sleep and sleep habits.
Qian said this is the first study to his knowledge to use a nationally representative population to look at how several sleep behaviours, and not just sleep duration, might influence life expectancy. About two-thirds of study participants self-reported as being White, 14.5 per cent Hispanic, 12.6per cent Black and 5.5 per cent Asian. Because researchers were able to link participants to the National Death Index records (through December 31, 2019), they could examine the association between individual and combined sleep factors and all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Participants were followed for a median of 4.3 years during which time 8,681 individuals died. Of these deaths, 2,610 deaths (30 per cent) were from cardiovascular disease, 2,052 (24 per cent) were from cancer and 4,019 (46 per cent) were due to other causes.
Researchers assessed five different factors of quality sleep using a low-risk sleep score they created based on answers collected as part of the survey. Factors included: 1) ideal sleep duration of seven to eight hours a night
2) difficulty falling asleep no more than two times a week 3) trouble staying asleep no more than two times a week
4) not using any sleep medication 5) feeling well rested after waking up at least five days a week. Each factor was assigned zero or one point for each, for a maximum of five points, which indicated the highest quality of sleep.
"If people have all these ideal sleep behaviours, they are more likely to live longer," Qian said. "So, if we can improve sleep overall, and identifying sleep disorders is especially important, we may be able to prevent some of this premature mortality."
