Don’t Sleep too Much or too Little Unless You Want to Have a Stroke

Insufficient sleep is known to produce a lot of damage in the human body, being tied to many conditions, from stroke to diabetes and heart failure, and there are numerous studies to  indicate that. You may think that the more you sleep, the healthier you are. However, a new study indicates the contrary. In fact, the people who tend to oversleep only have a slightly reduced chance of having a stroke in the future.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that around 800, 000 American people suffer a stroke every year and some of them are never able to recover completely.

The experiment was conducted by experts at Mount Sinai Hospital’s Icahn School of Medicine and points that people  who have high blood pressure have increased chances of experiencing a cerebrovascular accident if they sleep either more than eight hours or less than five hours per night.

Lead study author Dr. Oluwaseun Akinseye, along with a team of experts, analyzed data collected from more than 204,000 patients who suffered from hypertension. This data was taken from U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and covered a nine-year period of time. Their findings revealed that the people who slept five hours or less every night had 83 percent more chances of having a stroke than patients who slept on average seven or eight hours. What was more surprising, though, was the fact that people who slept more than eight hours had a 74 percent higher chance of experiencing a brain attack compared to those who slept seven or eight hours.  The results also showed that people who slept  seven or eight hours only had an 11 percent chance of experiencing a cerebral attack.

In general, it was believed that stroke risk was only 14 percent higher for people who oversleep and 11 percent higher for people who don’t get enough rest.

Other factors were taken into consideration before releasing the results, such as physical activity, lifestyle, health conditions and demographic factors.

The study has not yet been published nor peer-reviewed, so it is only regarded as a preliminary one. Dr. Oluwaseun Akinseye will present the results on Friday, at the American Society of  Hypertension held every year in New York.

The findings of the study have already met some criticism from experts who regard the data as irrelevant, due to the fact that it is collected from a survey where, the responders self-reported the hours of sleep: “With self-reporting, it’s hard to measure the quality of the sleep the patient gets,” says clinical assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, Dr. Amy Tai, who was not involved in the research.

Nevertheless, no matter how relevant the study is, experts still advise us to get between 6 and 9 hours of sleep every day in order to have a healthy lifestyle.

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