Sleeping 5 Hours Or Less Can Cause Multiple Health Problems
The study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine, took a closer look at a group of nearly 8,000 civil servants in the United Kingdom who had no chronic disease at age 50. Scientists asked the participants to report on how much sleep they got during clinic examinations every four to five years for the next 25 years.
If you’re like me, I often count how many hours of sleep I’ll get before I go to sleep. However I very seldom get five or more hours of sleep. I’m now at the age where I have to take a nap before I go to bed.
But in all seriousness, for those whose sleep was tracked at age 50, people who slept five hours or less a night faced a 30% higher risk that they would develop multiple chronic diseases over time than those who slept at least seven hours a night. At 60, it was a 32% increased risk, and at 70, it was a 40% greater risk.
Diseases for which there was a higher risk included Diabetes, Cancer, Coronary Heart Disease, Stroke, Heart Failure, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Kidney Disease, Liver Disease, Depression, Dementia, Mental Disorders, Parkinson’s and Arthritis.
Other research has shown that adults who do not get enough sleep about seven to nine hours a night have a greater chance of developing chronic diseases that also include obesity and high blood pressure, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Unlike other studies, the new one did not find that those who slept longer than nine hours had health problems, but few people in the study slept that much, and that may have affected the results.
