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People who take frequent naps are more at risk of high blood pressure and heart attack. This is apparent from a large-scale American study based on British health data, CNN writes.
jvhBron: CNN
Study participants who napped frequently during the day were found to have a 12 percent higher long-term risk of high blood pressure than those who never napped, and a 24 percent higher risk of a heart attack. In people younger than 60, a daily nap increased the risk of developing high blood pressure by 20 percent, the study published Monday in the journal showed. Hypertension. That conclusion held true even after people who were at a higher risk of high blood pressure anyway were excluded.
“While a nap in itself is of course not harmful, the explanation may be that they do so because they do not sleep well at night. And poor sleep is associated with poor health. Naps aren’t enough to make up for that,” said clinical psychologist Michael Grandner, head of a sleep clinic at the United States Banner-University Medical Center in the US state of Arizona, which was not involved in the study.
The study used data from 360,000 Britons who volunteered their health data to a large biomedical database for four years between 2006 and 2010. The study did not include data on the length of naps, and left the participants to interpret what they considered “a nap.”
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