Sleep is a vital function for our health, in ways that we actually don’t even fully understand. What is clear is that deficiency in this area is related to a multitude of different health problems; For example, him insomnia It is considered an important risk factor in cardiovascular diseases.
A risk 1.69 times greater
In order to quantify this relationship, widely documented in the scientific literature, an international group of scientists has carried out an extensive review of the published evidence in this regard until now. How they publish in the scientific journal Clinical Cardiology, Using this approach, they collected data from no fewer than 1,184,246 patients, of whom 152,881 suffered from insomnia.
The various studies included in this analysis analyzed the risk of insomnia, specifically, of have a heart attack; In technical terms, it is a specific cardiovascular pathology in which blood flow to the myocardium (the outer membrane of the heart) is blocked, causing damage or death in part of the tissue and compromising the function of the organ.
Based on these criteria, the authors of the paper observed that people with insomnia had a risk 1.69 times greater of having a heart attack than people who do not suffer from this sleep disorder.
Sleep time and risk
An interesting aspect is that there was a significant association not only with the fact of suffering from insomnia, but also based on the sleep duration. For example, those who slept only 5 hours had a 1.38 times greater risk of suffering a myocardial infarction than those who slept six hours.
Conversely, excessive sleep is also associated with an increased risk of myocardial infarction; the risk was the same for those who slept five hours or less than for those who slept nine hours or more each day.
References
Dean, YE, Shebl, MA, Rouzan, SS, et al. Association between insomnia and the incidence of myocardial infarction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Clin Cardiol (2023) DOI: doi:10.1002/clc.23984