Insomnia More Likely To Cause Heart Attack, Medical Research Reveals
Sleep is good and healthy in human life. Research has claimed that lack of sleep might cause heart diseases.
Insomnia a condition which medical institutions in Saudi Arabia, SUNY Medical University and Havard Medical School in the US define as the difficulty in falling a sleep, research has shown it’s much observed in women.
In other institutions, insomnia is defined as a condition where a person wakes up early and being unable to fall back asleep.
In a research analysis done by Global Medical Institutions in more than 11 years from 1,184,256 adult persons in European countries, 153,881 people were found to be suffering from insomnia.
Dr. Martha Gulati, Director of Prevention at the Cedars Sinai Smidt Heart Institute say, 10- 15 percentage of women patients she deals with in US per year struggle with insomnia.
“Insomnia is actually quite common. We see it probably in 1 in 10 patients in the United States. It is my impression that almost everyone experiences insomnia at some point in their life.
“The estimate is that 1 in 2 adults experience it at some point in their life, maybe in the short term because of stressful moments” notes Dr. Gulati.
However, in the recent research published on Clinical Cardiology, the publication claim that the potential association between insomnia and heart attack is strongest among women.
Among men according to World Health Organization report on Insomnia, the causes of the disorder are stress, long working hours, health defects and diet.
To women, WHO claims the same results but also links to the hormonal conditions in the bodies of men and women.
Cortisol a hormone responsible for regulating the body’s response to stress, if the levels are too high, it raises the body’s blood pressure.
“What really happens when you’re not getting enough sleep is that your cortisol gets out of whack.
“If you are having sleep problems, we know that your blood pressure is more elevated at night” says Dr. Gulati.
She adds that higher blood pressure at night caused by cortisol imbalance is one of the potential pathways to an increased risk of heart disease.
The Global Medical Institutions research from the sampled persons who were reported to having Insomnia say, insomniac persons were 1.69 times likely to have heart attack.
And even though the average or magic hours one is supposed to sleep is 7-8 hours, those who slept five hours or less had the highest association with heart attack risk.
“A lot of studies have pointed somewhere between seven and eight hours of sleep being the magic number for us but there is obviously variability for everyone, but too much sleep is rarely the issue” notes Dr. Gulati.
Longer sleep duration wasn’t always more protective but study found that people who slept six hours a night had a lower risk of a heart attack than those who slept nine hours or more.
However, study suggests that people need to regulate their minds to reduce stress and sleep for at least 6 hours to prevent cardiovascular health defects brought about for lack of sleep and sleep for too long.
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