How taking one or two naps a week may lower your risk of having heart attack or stroke
A daytime nap once or twice a week may lower the risk of having a heart attack or stroke, according to new research.
The impact of napping on heart health has been hotly contested, the study in the journal ‘Heart’ points out.
Research to be published today, and carried out by a team from the Department of Medicine at the Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland, says many of the studies failed to consider napping frequency, focused purely on cardiovascular disease deaths, or compared regular nappers with those not opting for a mini-siesta.
In a bid to examine these issues, they looked at the association between napping frequency and the length of the nap in relation to the risk of fatal and non-fatal heart attack, stroke, or heart failure, among 3,462 randomly selected residents aged 35 to 75.
Their first check-up took place between 2009 and 2012, when information on their sleep and nap patterns in the previous week was collected.
Their health was later monitored for an average of five years.
More than half of the participants said they did not nap during the previous week.
One in five took one to two naps and one in 10 said they took three to five, while a similar proportion took six to seven.
Frequent nappers, who had their 40 winks three to seven times a week, tended to be older, male, smokers, weigh more, and to sleep for longer at night than those who said they didn’t nap during the day.
They reported more daytime sleepiness and more severe obstructive sleep apnoea – a condition in which the walls of the throat relax and narrow during sleep, interrupting normal breathing.
There were 155 fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular disease ‘events’.
Occasional napping, once to twice weekly, was associated with an almost halving in attack, stroke and heart failure risk compared with those who didn’t nap at all.
Dr Angie Brown, a cardiologist and medical director with the Irish Heart Foundation, said it suggested that napping once or twice a week might be beneficial in reducing cardiovascular events.
However, other studies on the risks and benefits of napping had been quite varied.
She said it was an “observational study so doesn’t give us any information about why this frequency of napping might be beneficial and the information on nap and sleep patterns also relied on personal recall rather than physiological measurements”.
“It is difficult to compare studies as there is no gold standard for measuring and defining ‘naps’ making it difficult to make firm conclusions.
“The study is of interest and has promising results with potentially significant public health implications if the results can be confirmed and clarified.”
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