Is there an ideal time to go to bed every night if you want to dodge heart disease?
Apparently, there is, claims a new study that found hitting the sack between 10 and 11 p.m. may be the ideal time to cut the risk for cardiovascular trouble.
The finding may be worth heeding, since the researchers also found that going to sleep before 10 p.m. or at midnight or later might raise the risk for heart disease by nearly 25%. The raised risk may be traced to the altering of the body's circadian rhythm — its internal clock, the study authors say.
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How does the circadian system affect your health?
"The circadian system controls daily behavioral and physiological rhythms. Disruption to the circadian rhythm has wide-ranging implications, resulting in poorer cognitive performance and increased risk for various physical and mental health conditions, including cardiovascular disorders," lead researcher David Plans says.
The central clock in the brain controls the circadian rhythm throughout the body. This central clock is calibrated by exposure to light, particularly morning light, which is detected by receptors in the eyes, Plans explains.
"When this morning light is detected, the clock is recalibrated. Therefore, if a person goes to sleep very late, they might oversleep and miss this critical period of morning light," he adds. "If this occurs over an extended period of time, the circadian rhythm will become disrupted. As a result, there will be effects on other behavioral and physiological rhythms, which can be detrimental to health."
Plans cautions, however, that this study can't prove that the time one goes to sleep causes heart disease, but it might, if confirmed, be a possible risk factor.
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"These results highlight the importance of the body's circadian rhythm and adds to the growing evidence showing increased health risks — including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and even cancer — when our daily schedules are
misaligned with our circadian rhythm,” Dr. Harly Greenberg, chief of the division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, N.Y. says.
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What the research shows
For the study, Plans and his colleagues collected data on more than 88,000 men and women, average age 61, recruited between 2006 and 2010.
The researchers had information on when participants went to sleep and woke up over a week by using accelerometers worn on the wrist. Participants also completed questionnaires about lifestyle and health.
Over an average follow-up of nearly six years, 3.6% of the participants developed heart disease. Most of those who developed it went to sleep at midnight or later. People who were least likely to develop cardiovascular disease went to sleep between 10 p.m. and 10:59 p.m., the researchers found.
Those who went to sleep between 11 and 11:59 p.m. had a 12% higher risk, and those who went to sleep before 10 p.m. had a 24% higher risk.
After accounting for gender, the researchers found that the risk was greatest among women. Among men, only going to sleep before 10 p.m. remained significant, the researchers note.
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What is the best sleep routine?
"There is good evidence that morning light resets your circadian rhythm, and thus it may be beneficial to practice good sleep hygiene," Plans advises.
He provided the following tips for practicing good sleep hygiene:
- Go to sleep at a reasonable hour and wake up early enough to get some outside time in the morning.
- Avoid blue light at night.
- Avoid caffeine late in the day.
- Avoid naps after 4 p.m.
- Use the bedroom only for sleeping.
- Only go to bed when you feel like you are ready to sleep.
"These findings provide potential insights into how the timing of sleep onset relative to circadian rhythms may influence cardiovascular health. However, further studies are needed, and it remains to be demonstrated whether one changing the time of day they go to sleep would increase or decrease cardiovascular event risk," Dr. Gregg Fonarow, director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center in Los Angeles says.
