“Snooze Score” Predicts Future Heart Issues
The American Heart Association has a guideline called Life’s Simple 7. It highlights important steps you should take to improve and maintain your heart health.
Some of these steps are critical like maintaining healthy blood pressure, blood sugar, and weight.
Others are less serious like lowering LDL cholesterol levels.
But, based on overwhelming research, they’ve added an additional item to this checklist that might surprise some folks…
And it falls into the “critical” category:
SLEEP.
Never underestimate the importance of good sleep.
It does so much more than simply make you feel rested and rejuvenated. Your body actively uses the time that you’re sleeping for recovery and repair.
It also helps bolster your immune system and improve your brain performance.
Plus, it’s vital for fighting off the number one killer in the US: heart disease.
In a recent sleep study of 1,920 people averaging 69 years old, researchers added a sleep score to the Life’s Simple 7 (LS7) results.
That new score was arrived at by including details like:
- sleep duration
- regularity of sleep
- daytime sleeping
- sleep disorders
The researchers found that when they added the sleep score to the LS7 results they became significantly better at accurately predicting future heart events including heart attack, bypass surgery, and chest pain.
Ultimately, folks who had the highest scores for Life’s Simple 7 AND sleep had up to 80 percent lower odds of getting heart disease.
On the other end of the scale the volunteers who got the least amount of sleep had the highest prevalence of high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.
This was the first study to show that measuring sleep metrics can predict heart health.
Now, the AHA’s updated Life’s Simple 8 includes the following steps:
- Eat better.
- Be more active.
- Quit tobacco.
- Get healthy sleep.
- Manage weight.
- Control cholesterol.
- Manage blood sugar.
- Manage blood pressure.
The more of these steps you manage to take the healthier your heart is likely to be.
P.S. Melatonin is critical for regulating your body’s sleep/wake cycles. You simply can’t have good quality sleep without it. But don’t boost your levels with a supplement. Do THIS instead.
SOURCE:
“Redefining Cardiovascular Health to Include Sleep: Prospective Associations with Cardiovascular Disease in the MESA Sleep Study.” Journal of the American Heart Association, 2022;0: e025252, originally published: 19 Oct 2022, https://doi.org/10.1161/JAHA.122.025252.
