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"Sleeping Less Than Six Hours a Night Tied to Heart Disease" - Nicholas Bakalar

  • The New York Times
  • New York, NY
  • (January 16, 2019)

Sleeping less than six hours a night, and sleeping poorly, are associated with hardening of the arteries, a new study has found. Researchers used accelerometers attached to the waists of 3,974 healthy men and women, average age 46, to monitor the duration and quality of their sleep over seven nights. All underwent physical exams and three-dimensional ultrasound, an imaging system that evaluates blood flow through the blood vessels. The study is in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. “We’re detecting disease in its earliest stages in apparently healthy young people,” said a co-author, Valentin Fuster, MD, director of Mount Sinai Heart. “This is something that was done only at autopsy until now. This is an alarm system, telling you that there is another cardiovascular risk factor you should pay attention to.”

— Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, Director, Mount Sinai Heart, Physician in Chief, The Mount Sinai Hospital, Professor, Medicine, Cardiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai