"The groundwork of all happiness is health." - Leigh Hunt

Sleeping late on weekends might help your heart

August 29, 2023 – Get more sleep over the weekend may very well be exactly what you're in search of Heart must stay healthy and powerful.

Approximately one in three people report not getting enough rest or sleep day by day, and adults typically need between 7 and 9 hours per night. Previous research has already linked sleep problems to a spread of health problems that increase the danger of heart disease, heart attack and stroke.

In a recent study, researchers defined sleep deprivation as a daily lack of sleep of lower than 7 hours per night. They compared the health outcomes of 91,000 people over a 14-year period for the sleep-deprived and non-sleep-deprived groups. All individuals lived within the United Kingdom and provided their health information to a database called the UK Biobank.

People who got probably the most extra sleep on weekends had a 19% lower risk of developing heart disease than individuals who got the least compensatory sleep on weekends. When researchers analyzed just the group of sleep-deprived people, they found that those that got probably the most compensatory sleep on weekends had a similarly lower risk of heart disease (20%), in comparison with individuals who got the least extra sleep on weekends got. There were no differences in search results between men and women.

The Insights will likely be presented this weekend at a conference in London organized by the European Society of Cardiology.

“Our results show that for the significant proportion of the population in modern society who are sleep-deprived, those who 'catch up' the most on weekends are significantly less likely to suffer from heart disease than those who have the least,” said researcher Zechen Liu from the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in Beijing, China, said a press release.