Sleep Disorders are Widespread in U.S.

Apr 5, 2006 12:11 IST

Wakeful nights may force your blood pressure to shoot sky high, as per the study conducted by the Researchers at Columbia University in New York. As per the study, if you’re middle age and sleep five or fewer hours a night, you may be increasing your risk of higher blood pressure and increasing heart rate.

Wakeful nights may force your blood pressure to shoot sky high, as per the study conducted by the Researchers at Columbia University in New York. As per the study, if you’re middle age and sleep five or fewer hours a night, you may be increasing your risk of higher blood pressure and increasing heart rate.

The data for the study was collected from the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Study of 4,810 people ages 32 to 86 who did not have high blood pressure at baseline. The study was conducted after monitoring the subjects for a 10 year period. It was conducted by a team of researchers led by James E. Gangwisch, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the psychiatric epidemiology training (PET) program at Columbia University’s Mailman School.

The study resulted out with the higher risk of hypertension for those who slept less than six hours a night. It revealed that 24 percent of people ages 32 to 59 who slept for five or fewer hours a night developed hypertension after controlling for factors such as obesity, diabetes, physical activity, salt and alcohol consumption, smoking, depression, age, education, gender, and ethnicity as compared to 12 percent of those who got seven or eight hours of sleep.

Surprisingly 50 million to 70 million Americans experience habitual sleep disorders, while millions more are sleep-deprived, according to the report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The IOM’s mission is to serve as adviser to the nation to improve health. The Institute provides unbiased, evidence-based, and authoritative information and advice concerning health and science policy to policy-makers, professionals, leaders in every sector of society, and the public at large.

Sleep-deprivation is "driven largely by broad societal changes, including greater reliance on longer work hours, shift work and greater access to television and the Internet," but physiological factors such as obesity also play a key part, as per the institute’s report.
Michael Twery, acting director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research said that the National Institutes of Health, based in Bethesda, Maryland, has approximately doubled sleep-research funding in seven years, to about $200 million a year.

Insomnia or the sleep disorder -- alone costs the U.S. almost $14 billion a year. The report cited a 1995 study that listed about $2 billion of drugs and other substances used for the disorder, plus about $12 billion in nursing-home expenses and other costs attributed to it.

It is also unveiled in study that people who had inadequate sleep every night also worked-out less and was more possibly to have a higher body mass index.

James E. Gangwisch said, "Sleep allows the heart to slow down and blood pressure to drop for a significant part of the day. However, people who sleep for only short durations raise their average 24-hour blood pressure and heart rate. This may set up the cardiovascular system to operate at an elevated pressure."

Dr. Gangwisch said, "We had hypothesized that both BMI and a history of diabetes would mediate the relationship between sleep and blood pressure, and the results were consistent with this."

Researchers noticed that short sleep duration was linked to a new diagnosis of high blood pressure among middle-aged participants, but the association was not observed among people age 60 or older.
Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College by royal charter of King George II of England. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States. The University has more than a hundred departments of research and more than a hundred research institutes and centers.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is an honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. The nation turns to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies for science-based advice on matters of biomedical science, medicine, and health. A nonprofit organization specifically created for this purpose as well as an honorific membership organization, the IOM was chartered in 1970 as a component of the National Academy of Sc iences.