A team of American specialists, led by employees of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, found that lack of sleep increases the risk of atherosclerosis by 40 percent. The findings of the work are described in an article published in the Journal of the American Heart Association (AHA).

Atherosclerosis is a chronic disease of the arteries, which occurs due to a violation of lipid and protein metabolism. As a result, cholesterol accumulates on the walls of blood vessels, they thicken and lose their flexibility. The exact causes of this disease are still not known, but some studies have shown that the likelihood increases with an unhealthy lifestyle.

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Now scientists have decided to trace the link between lack of sleep and the development of atherosclerosis. To do this, we analyzed data from more than two thousand people with an average age of 69 years. Participants were asked to wear special bracelets for four years that tracked their bedtime and wake-up time. The subjects were also asked to keep a diary and note how their sleep patterns changed during the week.

Then the obtained information was compared with statistics on the frequency of formation of cholesterol plaques in the arteries, areas with reduced flexibility of the vessel walls and other manifestations of atherosclerosis. Sleep disturbance was one of the key causes of the disease.

With pronounced changes in sleep patterns and duration during the week, volunteers increased the risk of finding a large number of cholesterol plaques on the walls of the coronary artery by about 33-40 percent. On the carotid artery, these plaques formed 12 percent more often, and the likelihood of abnormally high vessel wall stiffness doubled.

The researchers believe that their discovery shows the possibility of reducing the incidence of atherosclerosis in the world in the case of the development of special methods and programs to normalize sleep patterns.