Sleeping Under 5 Hours a Night is Linked to Greater Heart Attack Risk

Sleeping under 5 hours a night is linked to a greater heart attack risk, but sleeping 8 hours is linked to a shorter life span.

Optimal Sleep

Several sleep studies have found that seven hours is the optimal amount of sleep —not eight, as was long believed — when it comes to certain cognitive and health markers.

People who sleep between 6.5 and 7.4 hours had lower mortality rates, according to a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 2002.

A 2011 study of 450 elderly women found that those who slept less than four hours but more than 6.5 had higher mortality.  

But never say never.

My mom only slept 4 hours a night and was one of the healthiest people I have ever known. I don’t recall my mother ever complaining about being tired.

But, she was also a supreme athlete.

I hate that we are so used to experts telling us how to live, how to sleep, and how to eat. We keep believing “them” even though what they recommend keeps changing!

I am not sure it is the quantity of sleep as much as the quality. Meaning how much deep restorative and REM sleep we get.

But stop worrying about getting 8 hours a night.

Insufficient Sleep

Take a look at this study from the Department of Psychiatry University of California in San Diego.

Abstract

Background: Patients often complain about insufficient sleep or chronic insomnia in the belief that they need 8 hours of sleep.

Methods: In 1982, the Cancer Prevention Study II of the American Cancer Society asked participants about their sleep duration and frequency of insomnia. Cox proportional hazards survival models were computed to determine whether sleep duration or frequency of insomnia was associated with excess mortality up to 1988, controlling simultaneously for demographics, habits, health factors, and use of various medications.

Results: Participants were more than 1.1 million men and women from 30 to 102 years of age.

The best survival was found among those who slept 7 hours per night.

Participants who reported sleeping 8 hours or more experienced significantly increased mortality hazard, as did those who slept 6 hours or less.

The increased risk exceeded 15% for those reporting more than 8.5 hours of sleep or less than 3.5 or 4.5 hours.

In contrast, reports of "insomnia" were not associated with excess mortality hazard.

As previously described, prescription sleeping pill use was associated with significantly increased mortality after control for reported sleep durations and insomnia.

Most sleep meds make us die prematurely. This is well-replicated data. Avoid sleep hypnotics.

Try oral progesterone (in both genders), magnesium in sufficient amounts, melatonin, and on and on.

(Read my free Insomnia Blog that has been republished with permission by the Townsend Letter, the American Holistic Medical Association, and the Price-Pottenger Foundation, as they all loved this info on sleep. Here is it for FREE!)

Conclusions:

Patients can be reassured that short sleep and insomnia seem associated with little risk distinct from comorbidities.

Slight risks associated with 8 or more hours of sleep and sleeping pill use need further study. Causality is unproven.

In yet another study, insomnia — difficulty falling or staying asleep — was associated with a 69% greater risk of having a myocardial infarction (MI) than among adults without insomnia.

Those who slept 5 or fewer hours per night had the highest risk for MI, and those with both diabetes and insomnia had double the risk for MI compared with patients without these comorbidities.

The findings are from a meta-analysis of studies of more than 1 million patients, almost all without prior MI who were, on average, in their early 50s and followed for 9 years.

Who said this? Yomna E. Dean, a medical student at Alexandria University, Egypt, reported these results in a press briefing on February 25, and the study was simultaneously published in Clinical Cardiology. (It will be presented at the upcoming American College of Cardiology (ACC) Scientific Session/World Congress of Cardiology (WCC) 2023).

Sleeping Too Much Is Equally Harmful

"Studies have found that insomnia and subsequent sleep deprivation puts the body under stress," Dean said. "This triggers cortisol release which could accelerate atherosclerosis," and increases the risk of MI.

For this analysis, the researchers identified nine observational studies, published from 1998 to 2019, with data on incident MI in adults who had insomnia.

The studies were in populations in China, Germany, Norway, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in 1.1 million adults aged 18 and older.

The patients had a mean age of 52 years and 13% had insomnia.

During follow-up, 2406 of 153,881 patients with insomnia, and 12,398 of 1,030,375 patients without insomnia had an MI.

In the pooled analysis, patients with insomnia had a significantly increased risk of MI (relative risk [RR] 1.69, P < .00001), after adjusting for age, gender, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and smoking.

Sleeping 5 hours or less was associated with a greater risk for MI than sleeping 6 hours, or 7-8 hours, but sleeping 9 hours or more was just as harmful.

Moral of this story:

Get an aura ring and see how much restorative sleep you get.

Don’t fret about sleep, just gently try to improve it.

7 hours seems great.

But some folks, like my mom, do phenomenal with even less.

More is not better, sleeping consistently at 9 to 10 hours a night suggests something is not right.

But let’s stop being sleep hypochondriacal about trying to get 8 hours of sleep a night.

That is old hat and not accurate.

Night night!

Dr. B.

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References:

Mortality associated with sleep duration and insomnia. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2002 Feb;59(2):131-6. doi: 10.1001/archpsyc.59.2.131. PMID: 11825133.

Clin Cardiol. Published online February 25, 2023. Full Text

American College of Cardiology (ACC) Scientific Session/World Congress of Cardiology (WCC) 2023. To be presented on March 6, 2023.

Insomnia, Short Sleep Linked to Greater Risk for MI - Medscape - Feb 27, 2023.