Heart Health Alert: Weekend Catch-Up Sleep Raises Heart Disease Risk

Heart health measures such as heart rate and blood pressure increase over the week when sleep is restricted to five hours per night, and attempting to catch up on lost sleep over the weekend may not be sufficient to return these measures to normal.

This finding was revealed by new research led by Penn State and published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether it is work or play that prevents us from getting enough shut-eye during the week, assuming we can make up for it by sleeping in over the weekend is a mistake.

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‘Simply trying to compensate for missed sleep during weekends may not be enough to mitigate the negative effects on the heart.#HeartHealth #SleepDeprivation #HeartRate’

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Only 65% of adults in the U.S. regularly sleep the recommended seven hours per night, and there is a lot of evidence suggesting that this lack of sleep is associated with cardiovascular disease in the long term ().

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This research reveals a potential mechanism for this longitudinal relationship, where enough successive hits to your cardiovascular health while you are young could make your heart more prone to cardiovascular disease in the future.

The team recruited 15 healthy men between the ages of 20 and 35 to participate in an 11-day inpatient sleep study. For the first three nights, the participants were allowed to sleep up to 10 hours per night to achieve a baseline sleep level.

For the next five nights, the participants’ sleep was restricted to five hours per night, followed by two recovery nights, in which they were again allowed to sleep up to 10 hours per night. To evaluate the effects of this sleep regime on cardiovascular health, the researchers measured the participants’ resting heart rates and blood pressure every two hours during the day ().

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This study is unique because it measured heart rate and blood pressure multiple times throughout the day for the duration of the study, which enabled them to account for any effects that time of day might have on heart rate and blood pressure.

The team found that heart rate increased by nearly one beat per minute (BPM) with each successive day of the study. Specifically, the average baseline heart rate was 69 BPM, while the average heart rate by the end of the study on the second day of recovery was nearly 78 BPM.

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Systolic blood pressure also increased by about 0.5 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) per day. The average baseline systolic blood pressure was 116 mmHg and was nearly 119.5 mmHg by the end of the recovery period.

Both heart rate and systolic blood pressure increased with each successive day and did not return to baseline levels by the end of the recovery period. So, despite having additional opportunities to rest, by the end of the weekend of the study, their cardiovascular systems still had not recovered.

Hence, researchers suggest that longer periods of sleep recovery may be necessary to recover from multiple, consecutive nights of sleep loss ().

Sleep is a biological process, but it is also a behavioral one and one that we often have a lot of control over. Not only does sleep affect heart health, but it also affects weight, mental health, ability to focus, and maintain healthy relationships with others, among many other things.

As we learn more and more about the importance of sleep, and how it impacts everything in our lives, let us hope that it will become more of a focus for improving one’s health.

References:

Association between weekend catch-up sleep and health-related quality of life of Korean adults - (https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/Fulltext/2019/03290/Association_between_weekend_catch_up_sleep_and.25.aspx)
Recovery sleep following sleep restriction is insufficient to return elevated daytime heart rate and systolic blood pressure to baseline levels - (https://journals.lww.com/psychosomaticmedicine/Abstract/9900/Recovery_sleep_following_sleep_restriction_is.139.aspx)
The Effects of Insomnia and Sleep Loss on Cardiovascular Disease - (https://www.sleep.theclinics.com/article/S1556-407X(22)00018-2/fulltext)

Source-Eurekalert