Actually, You Can Catch Up on Sleep

If you’re like most Americans, you’re not getting enough sleep.  And that exacts a toll on the body—especially the heart.  Poor sleep has been linked to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, inflammation, heart attack, and more. 

One solution: catch up on your sleep when you can, especially on weekends. But while that may help you feel more rested, can it really undo the cardiac damage that comes from a sleep-poor work week? According to a new study to be presented at the Sept. 1 meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, it may. 

The findings come from an analysis of nearly 91,000 people enrolled in the UK Biobank project, a large-scale biomedical database. People reported how much sleep they got per night, and those averaging fewer than seven hours—about 22% of the sample group—were considered sleep-deprived. People in the study briefly wore sleep-tracking devices that allowed the investigators to measure how much additional sleep they got over the weekend. The researchers then followed up on participants’ cardiovascular health 14 years later.

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Sleep-deprived people who got the most compensatory weekend sleep—sleeping at least 90 minutes more than they usually did during the week—had about a 20% lower risk of various illnesses, including heart failure, atrial fibrillation, ischemic heart disease, and stroke, compared to people who slept the least on weekends. 

Weekend catch-up sleep may have these effects in multiple ways. Heart rate slows during sleep and blood pressure can fall by 10% to 20%, a phenomenon known as nocturnal dipping. Poor sleep can also lead to chronic inflammation, which helps give rise to circulatory plaques, and catching up on sleep helps alleviate that. According to the University of Chicago School of Medicine, adults who sleep less than five hours a night also have a 200% to 300% increased risk of coronary artery calcification. Type 2 diabetes and obesity are linked to too little sleep as well, imposing their own strain on the heart. 

“Our results show that for the significant proportion of the population in modern society that suffers from sleep deprivation, those who have the most ‘catch-up’ sleep at weekends have significantly lower rates of heart disease than those with the least,” said study co-author Zechen Liu, of Beijing’s National Center of Cardiovascular Disease, in a statement.