How rubbish sleep might increase your risk of a stroke

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Peer-reviewed: This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts.

Observational study: A study in which the subject is observed to see if there is a relationship between two or more things (eg: the consumption of diet drinks and obesity). Observational studies cannot prove that one thing causes another, only that they are linked.

People: This is a study based on research using people.

If you are the type of person who tosses and turns at night and has interrupted sleep, you may also be at higher risk of a stroke, and now researchers from the US think they can explain why. They found that people with fragmented sleep tend to have higher numbers of inflammatory white blood cells called neutrophils, which then leads to them having higher coronary artery calcium, a measure of blocked blood vessels. The researchers say this suggests that getting a good nights sleep may be one way to reduce inflammation and reduce the risk of developing blocked blood vessels which can cause heart attacks and strokes.

Journal/conference: PLOS Biology

Link to research (DOI): 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000

Organisation/s: University of California, USA

Funder: This was not an industry supported study. MESA is supported by NHLBI funded contracts HHSN268201500003I, N01-HC-95159, N01-HC-95160, N01-HC-95161, N01-HC-95162, N01-HC-95163, N01-HC-95164, N01-HC-95165, N01-HC-95166, N01-HC-95167, N01-HC-95168, and N01-HC-95169 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and by cooperative agreements UL1-TR-000040, UL1-TR-001079, and UL1-TR- 001420 funded by NCATS. MESA Sleep was supported by NHLBI R01 HL098433. SR was partly supported by NIH NHLBI R35HL135818.

Media release

From: PLOS

Disrupted sleep increases the risk of cardiovascular disease by promoting inflammation

Sleep disruption has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of atherosclerosis, but the mechanism has been unclear. A new study in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Raphael Vallat, Vyoma Shah, and Matthew Walker of the University of California at Berkeley and colleagues reveals that fragmented sleep exacerbates atherosclerosis and may raise the risk of stroke via an effect on inflammatory pathways. These results provide a mechanism to explain the long-standing observation that poor sleep increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, and suggest simple and direct ways to reduce such risk.

To test whether the effect may be due in part to increased inflammatory signaling, the authors measured sleep disruption through both sleep lab-based polysomnography and a simple movement detector worn on the wrist over multiple nights (actigraphy). They used standard blood cell counts to measure levels of neutrophils and monocytes, two types of white blood cells responsible for driving inflammatory pathways.

They found that sleep fragmentation, as measured by actigraphy, predicted both higher neutrophil (but not monocyte) counts and higher coronary artery calcium, a measure of atherosclerosis pathology. Using a statistical method known as mediation analysis, they showed that the influence of sleep fragmentation on coronary artery calcium was mediated through the increase in neutrophils; in other words, poor sleep led to an increase in neutrophils, which in turn led to an increase in atherosclerosis. The influence of sleep disruption on neutrophils and atherosclerosis remained significant after accounting for multiple known contributors to artery disease, including age, sex, ethnicity, body mass index, smoking, blood pressure, and other factors.

A similar association was found for sleep disruption as measured by polysomnography, although it was not as robust, remaining significant after correcting for some but not all contributors, a difference the authors suggest may be due to the shorter duration of polysomnography (a single night) versus actigraphy (one week). No association was found for subjectively reported poor sleep, in which subjects were asked to recall the quality of their sleep, a finding which suggests that asking patients about the sleep may not be a useful tool for assessing their sleep-related risk of heart disease.

“Improving sleep may offer a novel way to reduce inflammation and thus reduce the risk of atherosclerosis,” Walker said. “These findings may help inform public health guidelines that seek to increase the continuity of sleep as a way to improve health and decrease the burden of heart disease on society.”

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