If you needed another reason to get enough sleep, here it is: it might help your heart health. The American Heart Association has added sleep duration to its cardiovascular health checklist. It is part of “Life’s Essential 8”, a questionnaire that measures eight key areas to determine a person’s cardiovascular health.
The updated list was published Wednesday in Circulation, the AHA’s peer-reviewed journal, and replaced the association’s “Life’s Simple 7” questionnaire, which had been in use since 2010.
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In addition to sleep, the new list kept the original categories: diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, body mass index, blood lipids, blood glucose and blood pressure.
Sleep duration entered the list after researchers examined new scientific findings over the past decade that found sleep played an important role in heart health, according to Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, AHA’s medical director for prevention.
“People who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to have things like obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes,” Sanchez said.
What counts as healthy sleep?
Adults should get seven to nine hours of sleep a night, said pulmonary intensive care and sleep expert Dr. Raj Dasgupta, an associate clinical professor at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
However, people need to get quality sleep to reap the benefits, said Dasgupta, who is also a spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
A person goes through several sleep cycles made up of non-REM and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, Dasgupta said. There are three stages of non-REM sleep, and in the third you go into deep sleep, which restores the body both mentally and physically, he explained.
If you keep waking up, it will keep you from going to those deeper stages, Dasgupta said. This can lead to increased blood pressure and increased blood sugar levels, which are associated with diabetes and obesity, he said. These conditions contribute to decreased heart health and increase the risk of developing heart failure, Dasgupta said.
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