Good Sleep Habits Tied to Lower Risk of Heart Failure

A combination of healthy sleep habits may help reduce the risk for heart failure, new research suggests.

Scientists studied 408,802 generally healthy people aged 27 to 73 between 2006 and 2010, collecting information on their sleep habits. Each person got a zero-to-five “healthy sleep score,” based on five healthy sleep practices: being a “morning person”; sleeping seven to eight hours a night; rarely or never snoring; rarely having insomnia; and rarely being excessively sleepy during the day.

Over an average follow-up of 10 years, there were 5,221 cases of heart failure. Compared with people who scored zero or one, those who scored two had a 15 percent reduced risk for heart failure; those who scored three had a 28 percent reduced risk; and those who scored four a 38 percent risk reduction. Those who scored a perfect five had a 42 percent lower risk of heart failure compared with those who scored zero or one.

The study, in the journal Circulation, controlled for smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, diabetes, hypertension and other variables. It is an observational study, however, so it does not prove causality.

“We should consider all of these sleep behaviors together rather than treating them as separate phenomena,” said the senior author Dr. Lu Qi, a professor of epidemiology at Tulane University. “People regulate their sleep as a whole, not as separate events.”