Dr. Eduard Estivill says that “two and three weeks can last without drinking and eating, but not more than 7 days without sleeping.” If you don’t know him, Dr. Estivill, in addition to being a neurophysiologist, is a specialist in Sleep Medicine. His rules and pedagogies collected in the Estivilla Method have helped many parents to solve their children’s insomnia.
According to D. Estiville, how many hours should we sleep? “Although the necessary daily hours of sleep are not exactly known, the limits are usually between five or six hours and nine or ten hours, although the majority of people usually have seven or eight hours,” we can read on his website. where it is noted that “sleep necessarily varies in each person, from night to night, since infinite causes from age to genetic factors play a role.” But newborns can act sleeping for 18 hours, with small intervals of wakefulness in between.
<3 For eight or ten years, children usually sleep between nine and ten hours straight, although the best sleepers are preteens, twelve to fourteen years old, who sleep a lot during the 3/4 (high) phase. But the place of time has to do with the quality and quantity of sleep. An adult sleeps seven or eight hours without interruption, while a 70-year-old usually sleeps barely six hours and usually sleeps lightly with multiple wakes.
If we focus only on the adult, it is most common to sleep between 7-8 hours in all stages of sleep; facilitate the recovery of our body by strengthening our immune system; give us strength to face the new day by improving our cardiovascular health; they increase melatonin and serotonin, which improve our mood and help fight stress; and besides, nutritionists say, we keep our weight in check by sleeping for eight hours.
What if we don’t sleep that third of the day? What happens if we change the body’s circadian rhythm? The result is that we all experienced sometime when we took the night watch. Where we notice this is mainly in our state of mind, because we are irritable when the stress hormone is released, which can lead us to a state of depression and anxiety if that bad rest is prolonged over time. Our immune system is weakened; We gain weight because sleeping less than necessary decreases the release of leptin, the hormone that regulates appetite and thermogenesis, so we burn fat and the production of ghrelin, which regulates appetite and nutritional homeostasis. The problems and the heart begin.
“The miserable sleep of health care,” explains the doctor for cope.es Armando Oterino, cardiologist at the Hospital Universitario de Salamanca, “with a series of factors involved in cardiovascular disease, such as obesity, hypertension or an increase in the levels of lipids, including both cholesterol and triglycerides. such are the persons who do not need, from their chronotype, to sleep as much or to sleep as others, but as a general rule, we should not prescribe sleeps that are less than 6 hours. People who sleep less than 6 hours have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Drowsiness is associated with greater cardiovascular disease.
There is a direct relationship between little sleep and heart failure. Insomnia increases the effect of hormones, an increase in cholesterol, which leads to an increase in blood pressure and heart rate.
Irregular sleep habits increase the risk of atherosclerosis
That vigilance is connected with heart disease is an empirical fact. The latest study that delved deeper into this question was published in Nashville, Tennessee, Tennessee (USA) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and was just published by the Journal of the American Heart Association and was led by a physician. Kelsie Full which makes it “one of the first studies that provides a connection between irregular sleep duration and atherosclerosis.”
Poor-quality sleep, with long interruptions and a highly variable duration night after night, in addition to hypertension, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other cardiovascular diseases, can increase the risk of developing atherosclerosis among adults older than 45 years. to a people more constantly accustomed to sleep.
“Almost all major cardiovascular functions, including the heart, blood pressure, vascular tone, endothelial functions, are regulated by circadian clock genes,” the researchers explain, stating that the disruption of circadian rhythms “disrupts these important cardiovascular functions, resulting in the promotion of chronic inflammation, alterations glucose metabolism, increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system and increased blood pressure, all of which contribute to the risk of developing atherosclerosis.
Atherosclerosis is a buildup of fatty deposits that form plaque on the walls of the arteries. Plaque can cause arteries to narrow, reducing blood and the amount of oxygen and other nutrients that reach the body. It can also break and create a blood clot that blocks an artery, which could lead to a heart attack or stroke.
The worse the quality of sleep, the more calcium in the arteries
Over three years, 2,032 adults, with a median age of 69 and of various races and ethnicities, from six communities across the United States. [más de la mitad de los participantes eran mujeres, el 38 % adultos blancos, el 28 % adultos negros o afroamericanos, el 23 % adultos hispanoamericanos y el 11 % adultos chinoamericanos], by Dr. Full wrist wrist articulating alert detected while sleeping and awake, sleep-interrupted breathing, sleep apnea, arousal after sleep, heart attack and rate. Each and every one of them celebrated a sleep diary for seven consecutive days. Overworked workers, already irregular sleeping patterns, people with existing heart disease or obstructive sleep apnea, a known risk factor for coronary artery disease, were excluded.
The researchers measured the presence of plaque in the arteries: calcified plaque or calcium from the coronary arteries; accumulation of fatty plaque in the neck of the artery -presence of carotid plaque-; thickness of the two internal layers of the arteries of the neck -thickness of the carotid intima-media; and narrowed peripheral arteries or talar brachial index.
The study concluded: participants with irregular sleep durations that varied by more than two hours within a week were 1.4 times more likely to have increased coronary calcium than those with more consistent sleep durations within a week. Irregular sleep durations, which varied by more than two hours per week, were 1.12 times more likely to have carotid plaque and almost 2 times more likely to have abnormal results in the brachial ankle index, a systemic test of atherosclerosis and blood stiffness. .
Research participants with more irregular sleeping schedules, varying more than 90 minutes per week, were 1.43 times more likely to have elevated coronary artery calcium scores compared to those with more regular sleeping schedules, varying 30 minutes or less per week.
Adequate sleep prevents heart disease
“These results suggest that regular or habitual sleep duration, or sleeping nearly the same amount of time each night, can play an important role in preventing cardiovascular disease,” concludes Dr. Kelsie Full, who recommends sleeping every night. and 9 hours, because adequate sleep promotes healing, improves brain function and reduces the risk of chronic disease.
How can we sleep those recommended hours for health in general and especially for cardiovascular health? It is best to follow, as much as possible, the advice of Dr. Armando Oterino:
First of all, with a daily routine both when we sleep and when we wake up, we avoid stimulants such as coffee or tea, do not consume alcohol that reduces the quality of sleep, do not play sports at the last minute, because the nervous system works and in the technological age, avoid shelves that emit blue light, which for our retina and our brain recognize that it is daytime and do not produce melatonin, which produces sleep quality and insomnia. All this, says Dr. Oterino -cardiologist at the Hospital of the University of Salamanca-, together with a light dinner and not too close to bed, will make our sleep better and more restful.
Therefore, it is far from counting sheep (even if it helps some), if you get into bed, and turn to the trapdoor of the room and look, and a minute goes by and another and another… and so on up to 20. another extreme is to get up and walk around the house (without making a noise, if the others wake up); there are those who use a glass of warm milk; Others listen to relaxing music, I know someone who takes a very hot bubble bath or starts reading one of ours, in a second all the letters come together.
The lesson of this new study is how important sleep is, how many hours of restful sleep can reduce the problems that can affect our hearts. Because the doctor Oterino says that “sleep is the fundamental pillar in a healthy lifestyle” and… [Jornada 3, escena 19 del monólogo de Segismundo de ‘La vida es sueño’ de Calderón de la Barca’].
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