Lack of Sleep Can Raise Your Blood Pressure

Getting enough sleep has been in the news recently – we’ve mentioned it here before. Now a relationship has been shown for high blood pressure. According to researchers at Columbia, New York, people who get 5 or fewer hours of sleep a night are 60% more likely to develop high blood pressure than those who sleep for 6 to 8 hours.

There were over 4800 people in the study, and 13% of them developed hypertension over a 10-year period. In 32- to 59-year-olds the risk of hypertension was 2.1 times greater in those sleeping 5 or less hours a night; this increase was significant, even after adjustments had been made for the presence of obesity and diabetes, the most common risk factors for hypertension. Interestingly, the link between sleep lack and hypertension was not present in the test subjects over 60. And sleeping more than 9 hours didn’t reduce the likelihood of hypertension beyond that seen for the 6-8 hour- sleepers.

The researchers had a lot of different ideas about why lack of sleep was an independent cause of hypertension in their study. But more will need to be done to dissect these ideas and test them all. In the meantime, try to get a good night’s rest!