Want to keep your heart healthy? Just ensure you aren’t deprived of sleep

Your long working hours and short term sleep can adversely affect the heart condition, a study warns. Those working in 24-long hours shifts like those in fire and emergency medical services, medical residencies and other high-stress jobs, get less time to sleep, which is not a healthy step.

Daniel Kuetting, author of the study from University of Bonn in Germany, claimed that for the first time it has been found how sleep deprivation leads to significant increase in cardiac contractility, blood pressure and heart rate

For the study, Kuetting and colleagues recruited 20 healthy radiologists, including 19 men and one woman, with a mean age of 31.6 years.

Each of the study participants underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging with strain analysis before and after a 24-hour shift with an average of three hours of sleep.

The researchers also collected blood and urine samples from the participants and measured blood pressure and heart rate.

Following short-term sleep deprivation, the participants showed significant increases in blood pressure and heart rate.

"The study was designed to investigate real-life work-related sleep deprivation," Kuetting said.

As people continue to work longer hours or work at more than one job to make ends meet, it is critical to investigate the detrimental effects of too much work and not enough sleep.

The results of this pilot study are transferable to other professions in which long periods of uninterrupted labour are common, Kuetting said.

"These findings may help us better understand how workload and shift duration affect public health," he noted.

(With IANS Inputs)

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago.