Lacking Sleep Boosts Risk of High Blood Pressure

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=ainBGYnt8H74

By Nicole Ostrow

June 9 (Bloomberg) -- Sleeping less than seven or eight hours a night as a routine puts people at risk for high blood pressure, a study found.

The less the adults participating in the research slept, the more likely they were to see their blood pressure rise, according to research published in yesterday’s Archives of Internal Medicine. For every hour of missed sleep, odds of developing the condition rose an average 37 percent over five years, said Kristen Knutson, the lead author. Skipping two hours sleep raised the blood pressure risk 86 percent.

More than 73 million American adults have high blood pressure and about 70 million suffer from chronic sleep problems, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Uncontrolled high blood pressure can lead to heart attack, stroke, heart failure or kidney failure, according to the American Heart Association.

These study’s results “confirm what we’ve seen in the lab that there are health consequences to not getting enough sleep or not sleeping well,” said Knutson, a research associate and assistant professor at the University of Chicago. “People don’t respect sleep relative to diet and exercise as part of a healthy lifestyle.”
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Lack of sleep may affect the body’s sympathetic nervous system, which controls how the body responds to stress through the fight or flight response, Knutson said. Chronic lack of sleep or sleep problems may have a long-term effect on the cardiovascular system, increasing high blood pressure, she said. Not getting enough sleep is also related to obesity and diabetes, affecting overall heart health, she said.