Sleep: The Overlooked Prescription

Faye Prior | 2014-05-16 04:56:17

I love sleep. Which is strange since I’ve had sleep problems for a very long time, I guess I appreciate the euphoria of a good 60 minutes of unbroken sleep.

I’ve also met lots of people with heart failure, and if I were to list some long term conditions which I wouldn’t want, heart failure would make the list with no problems.

Putting the two together, heart failure and poor sleep, seems like a very undesirable cocktail to me. Yet new information presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress  tells us that this happening, and its making the prognosis for these patients worse.

In Dr Peter Johansson and colleague’s research, 43% of heart failure patients reported a sleep problem at discharge, and this persisted 12 months later in 30% of patients. Of the patients who didn’t have a sleep problem at discharge, 14% went on to develop one. The startling problem is that the risk of hospitalisation for any cause, not just heart failure related, was double in those with a sleep problem. I struggle to find many patients who enjoy being in hospital once, never mind twice as much.

For my love of sleep, I have previously written about the negative and positive benefits of sleep for other aspects of health. Now I can add that sleep has a significant role in the course of heart failure, probably due to the link between sleep and inflammation. Consistently poor sleep needs to be addressed with sleep hygiene prescription, and we have talked previously about lifestyle interventions such as exercise, diet, meditation, and avoidance of electronics. This new research proposes that perhaps we should also be asking people about their sleeping habits more often.

Faye Prior (Researcher)

Source

http://www.escardio.org/about/press/press-releases/pr-14/Pages/poor-sleep-doubles-hospitalisations-heart-failure-patients.aspx?hit=dontmiss

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dominiqs/331702231