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Not getting enough Zzzs each night? (We’re looking at you, tired healthcare workers.) Results from a 16-year-long study published last month suggested that a lack of sleep may increase the chance of high blood pressure in women—though more research is needed to specifically understand the risk of hypertension for healthcare professionals.
Women who got five hours or less of sleep per night had a “significantly higher” likelihood of developing hypertension compared to those who slept at least seven to eight hours each night, researchers at the Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital found using data from the Nurses’s Health Study (NHS), a decades-long effort to examine risk factors for chronic diseases in women.
“These findings suggest that individuals who struggle with symptoms of insomnia may be at risk of hypertension and could benefit from preemptive screening,” Shahab Haghayegh, the study’s author and a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said in a statement. “The sooner we can identify individuals with high blood pressure and treat them for it, the better we can mitigate future health issues.”
The study looked at more than 66,000 participants who were between the ages of 25–42 from 2001 to 2017 and didn’t have hypertension at the beginning of the research. Over that time span, researchers collected data on participants’ family histories of high blood pressure and their sleeping patterns, including sleep duration and trouble falling or staying asleep.
The researchers documented nearly 26,000 patients who developed high blood pressure during the study and found “a significant association between difficulty falling asleep or maintaining sleep, and short sleep duration, with higher risk of hypertension,” according to the study.
These findings were consistent among participants who reported working night shifts as well as those who regularly woke up early in the morning, per the study.
The study comes as both lack of sleep and hypertension rates are high among US adults. About one-third of US adults reported getting less than seven hours of sleep each night in 2020, per the CDC. In addition, nearly half of US adults were living with high blood pressure in 2020, according to the Million Hearts initiative led by the CDC and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Hypertension is also a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke—two leading causes of death in the country—but the condition can be prevented and managed by being physically active and monitoring blood pressure levels on a regular basis, according to the CDC.
For Haghayegh, however, these findings don’t “indicate causality.” More research is needed to determine if sleep medications could help treat patients with high blood pressure, he added.
The study’s authors said follow-up studies could include men or nonbinary participants, or look at healthcare workers’ sleep patterns.
“Studies are lacking on the sleep of healthcare providers, who are disproportionately
burdened by long work hours and night shifts, and their associated risk of hypertension,” the study’s authors wrote.