Therapist Unlimited Blog

Women around the world should strive hard to achieve ample time of sleep ideally eight hours a day to avoid chances of suffering from heart related medical problems.
According to the research conducted by the University of Warwick and University College London it was discovered that women who get less than the recommended eight hours sleep a night are at higher risk of heart disease and heart-related problems than men with the same sleeping patterns.
The researchers have found out that levels of inflammatory markers vary significantly with sleep duration in women, but not men.
The researchers revealed they found Interleukin-6 (IL-6), a marker related to coronary heart disease, were significantly lower in women who reported sleeping eight hours as compared with seven hours.
Lead author of the study, Associate Professor of Biochemical Medicine at Warwick Medical School Michelle Miller said short-term sleep deprivation studies have shown that inflammatory markers are elevated in sleep-deprived individuals, suggesting that inflammatory mechanisms may play a role in the cardiovascular risk associated with sleep deprivation.
The lead researcher said their study could provide some insight into a potential mechanism for the observation in previous studies, which indicates an increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease in individuals who have less than five hours sleep per night, and increased risk of non-cardiovascular death in long sleepers.

Women need to have adequate sleep to avoid suffering from heart related diseases.

She said this is the first large-scale study to describe the associations between measures of inflammation and sleep duration in both men and women.
To get the data, Miller said they carefully evaluated 4,600 white participants from the University College London-based Whitehall II cohort study; 73% were men.
She said participants between the ages of 35 and 55 years were recruited between 1985 and 1988 from 20 London-based civil service departments.
Data for this study is from the phase 3 follow-up (1991-1993). Sleep duration was determined by subjective questionnaires, and general health was assessed during a screening examination.
Furthermore, Miller said the findings add to the growing body of evidence, which suggests that there is a non-linear relationship between cardiovascular risk factors and duration of sleep. She said her team fully support the idea that short sleep is associated with an increase in cardiovascular risk and that the association between sleep duration and cardiovascular risk factors is markedly different in men and women.