As I get older, I realize just how much sleep, or lack thereof, can affect you. For whatever reason, lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I know that lack of sleep can make you grouchy and irritable, but today, I read that a study may show that lack of sleep can do even more harm by raising your blood pressure.
The study, published in Hypertension, the journal of the American Heart Association, was authored by Dr. Susan Redline, Professor of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The researchers studied 800 men over the age of 65 that had no record of high blood pressure before the study began.
The men took at-home tests to check their sleep patterns and measure their non-rapid eye movement sleep. This is the deep sleep you always hear people talking about. Also known as slow wave sleep, this usually occurs early in the night and is believed to be a time when the body restores its energy.
The blood pressure of the men was monitored for almost three years. During that time, they found that men who suffered from a lack of deep sleep were 80% more likely to develop high blood pressure. The men who suffered from lack of sleep were those that got less than six hours of sleep a night, woke up due to health issues, sleep apnea, or medications, and weren’t able to fall back to sleep quickly.
Dr. Redline noted that this increase in blood pressure appeared to have nothing to do with pauses during sleep caused by sleep apnea. High blood pressure can damage your blood vessels.
Being physically active may help people sleep better, however, those who are tired during the day, snore, or stop breathing during sleep should be checked out for sleep problems.