Catching up on sleep on weekends may lower heart disease risk by up to 20%: ESC 2024

Sleep deprivation was self-reported, with those self-reporting less than 7 hours sleep per night defined as having sleep deprivation. A total of 19,816 (21.8%) of participants were defined as sleep deprived. The rest of the cohort may have experienced occasional inadequate sleep, but on average, their daily hours of sleep did not meet the criteria for sleep deprivation – the authors recognise this a limitation to their data.

Hospitalisation records and cause of death registry information were used to diagnose various cardiac diseases including ischaemic heart disease (IHD), heart failure (HF), atrial fibrillation (AF), and stroke.

With a median follow-up of almost 14 years, participants in the group with the most compensatory sleep (quartile 4) were 19% less likely to develop heart disease than those with the least (quartile 1). In the subgroup of patients with daily sleep deprivation those with the most compensatory sleep had a 20% lower risk of developing heart disease than those with the least. The analysis did not show any differences between men and women.

Co-author Mr Zechen Liu, also of State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease, Fuwai Hospital, National Centre for Cardiovascular Disease, Beijing, China, added: “Our results show that for the significant proportion of the population in modern society that suffers from sleep deprivation, those who have the most ‘catch-up’ sleep at weekends have significantly lower rates of heart disease than those with the least.”