When It’s Worse for Women

It seems that all of us—male and female, young and old—are not getting enough sleep.  Some even scrimp by on five to six hours of sleep a night (myself included)!  This kind of sleep debt takes its toll on virtually every aspect of life, be it in the emotional, the physical or the mental realm.

But according to a recent study published in the journal Sleep, this lack of sleep takes a more significant toll on women than it does on men.

This new finding by researchers from the University of Warwick piggy backs on a study they conducted in 2007, which found that women who slept for five hours or less a night were at more than twice the risk for hypertension than women who got at least seven hours of sleep per night.  There was no increased risk for hypertension observed among men.

There’s no question that more men suffer from hypertension than do women.  And there are far more men that have heart disease than women.  But remember, there are lots of variables to consider when assessing risk for heart disease.  Sleep is only one of them.  And for women, sleep plays a more significant role than other risk factors.

In the researchers’ latest finding tying sleep to heart health, they looked at the health statistics of approximately 4,600 white males and females between 35 and 55 years old.  Most of the participants were men.  Their analysis involved researching their medical history (vitals, blood work, etc.) and assessing questionnaires filled out by the volunteers, which charted a number of things, including how much sleep they were getting every night.

After controlling for contributing factors, they found some disturbing commonalities in the numbers among women that slept less than the recommended seven to eight hours.  Consistently, women who slept for five hours or less had unusually high amounts of protein in their blood, proteins that are predictive of heart disease.  One of those high proteins was hs-CRP, or highly sensitive C-Reactive Protein.  The American Heart Association says that high amounts of hs-CRP “consistently predicts coronary events” and that the “higher the hs-CRP level, the higher the risk of having a heart attack.”

Elevated HS-CRP levels don’t just predict heart disease, they also predict inflammation, and indeed, inflammation levels were higher among women than men, particularly women that consistently slept for five hours a night or less.  Inflammation is the body’s natural response to anything physically injurious, like an infection, internal toxins or external irritants (e.g. burns, frostbite, etc).  A classic sign of inflammation is redness or swelling.

Again, all of us need to be doing our best to get at least seven to eight hours of sleep a night.  And as this study shows, it’s particularly important for women.

It’s so easy to lull yourself into thinking five to six hours of sleep a night is fine for you; that while other people should be getting seven to eight hours of sleep per night, you operate just fine on five hours.

You’re not the exception to the rule.  You may feel fine now, but a growing sleep debt will catch up with you eventually.  Don’t let it catch up to you in the form of heart disease.

Sources
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
americanheart.org