William Atkins
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 01:13
Science -
Health
Page 1 of 3
A U.S. research study has shown that adolescents who do not sleep enough and/or have poor quality sleep may be at increased risk for elevated blood pressure (what is called pre-hypertension) and, consequently, as adults may increase their risk of high blood pressure (hypertension) and other related medical problems.
The article “
Sleep Quality and Elevated Blood Pressure in Adolescents” is authored by Sogol Javaheri, Amy Storfer-Isser, Carol L. Rosen, and Susan Redline. It appears in the August 18, 2008 issue of
Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association.
Susan Redline, the lead author of the study, is a professor of medicine and pediatrics and director of University Hospitals Sleep Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.
According to the abstract of their paper, the study began as an investigation as to whether
“insufficient sleep is associated with prehypertension in healthy adolescents.”
The research group studied 238 adolescent children (teenagers between the ages of 13 and 16 years), none of which had sleep apnea (pauses in breathing during sleep) or severe comorbidities (presence of one or more disorders/diseases in addition to a primary disorder/disease).
In other words, each of the 123 boys and 115 girls participating in the study were "so-called" healthy kids.
Each child participated in five to seven days of monitoring (a motion-detecting device on the wrist) at home to determine rest/sleep and activity cycles—what is called wrist actigraphy. The subjects also kept a sleep log during this time.
Over a two-night period in a laboratory setting, polysomnography (PSG, a series of tests involving sleep patterns), anthropometry (tests involving physical variability in individuals), and nine blood-pressure measurements were taken.
The researchers wanted to find out from these tests and measurements whether the adolescents had (1)
“low weekday sleep efficiency,” which is “an objective measure of sleep quality” and/or (2)
“short sleep duration” or insufficient amount of sleep.
A “low weekday sleep efficiency” is quantified as less than 85% and a "short sleep duration" was pre-determined to be less than 6.5 hours of sleep, on average, each night.
The conclusions follow on page two.
