(NewsNation) — Do those extra hours of sleep on the weekend actually protect you from health risks associated with sleep deprivation?
Experts from Penn State say no.
The measurement of your cardiovascular health worsens if you’re only sleeping five hours a night, according to a study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Attempting to then catch up on lost sleep over the weekend isn’t sufficient to return the measures to normal.
“Only 65% of adults in the U.S. regularly sleep the recommended seven hours per night, and there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that this lack of sleep is associated with cardiovascular disease in the long term,” said author Anne-Marie Chang, associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. “Our research reveals a potential mechanism for this longitudinal relationship, where enough successive hits to your cardiovascular health while you’re young could make your heart more prone to cardiovascular disease in the future.”
A team of Penn State researchers recruited 15 healthy men between the ages of 20 and 35 to participate in an 11-day inpatient sleep study. The participants were allowed to sleep up to 10 hours per night for the first three nights. For the next five nights, they were restricted to five hours per night, followed by two recovery nights. The study measured resting heart rate and blood pressure every two hours during the day. This enabled researchers to understand how heart rates differed depending on the time of day.
According to the team, both heart rate and blood pressure among the participants increased each day and didn’t return to baseline levels by the end of the recovery period. Even with the additional time to rest, the cardiovascular systems didn’t recover.
“Sleep is a biological process, but it’s also a behavioral one and one that we often have a lot of control over,” Chang said. “Not only does sleep affect our cardiovascular health, but it also affects our weight, our mental health, our ability to focus and our ability to maintain healthy relationships with others, among many other things. As we learn more and more about the importance of sleep, and how it impacts everything in our lives, my hope is that it will become more of a focus for improving one’s health.”