Many people feel tired during the day from time to time, but constant sleepiness may be telling us something much more important.
Feeling sleepy during the day is often blamed on a busy lifestyle or a poor night’s sleep. However, new research suggests that excessive daytime sleepiness may also be an early warning sign of future heart health problems.
Scientists have found that adults who regularly struggle to stay awake during the day may have a much higher risk of developing high blood pressure, especially if they also take a long time to fall asleep at night.
The findings will be presented at the SLEEP 2026 annual meeting, and the research abstract has been published in an online supplement of the journal Sleep.
High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is one of the leading causes of heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease, and other serious health problems.
Because it often causes no obvious symptoms, many people do not know they have it until complications develop. Finding early warning signs could help doctors identify people who need treatment before permanent damage occurs.
The study was carried out by researchers at Penn State College of Medicine. They wanted to learn whether daytime sleepiness and difficulty falling asleep together could identify people at particularly high risk of hypertension.
The researchers analyzed information from 1,741 adults who took part in the Penn State Adult Cohort. Everyone completed an overnight sleep study called polysomnography, which carefully measures sleep throughout the night.
Participants were also asked about their daytime sleepiness. For the long-term part of the study, 786 participants who did not have high blood pressure at the beginning were followed for an average of 7.5 years.
The researchers defined excessive daytime sleepiness as moderate to severe daytime sleepiness or irresistible urges to fall asleep. They also measured how long it took participants to fall asleep. Taking 30 minutes or longer was considered prolonged sleep-onset latency.
The results showed that people with excessive daytime sleepiness were much more likely to have high blood pressure than people without daytime sleepiness. They also had a greater chance of developing hypertension during the years of follow-up.
The highest risk occurred when excessive daytime sleepiness was combined with difficulty falling asleep. In this group, the chance of already having hypertension more than doubled, while the chance of developing hypertension later was more than three times higher.
Lead researcher Dr. Alexandros Vgontzas explained that this combination appears to identify a unique group of people with particularly high cardiovascular risk. Interestingly, daytime sleepiness alone or taking longer to fall asleep alone did not produce the same strong association.
To make the results as reliable as possible, the researchers adjusted for many other factors that could affect blood pressure. These included age, sex, body weight, smoking, alcohol use, caffeine intake, diabetes, depression, sleep apnea, and the total amount of sleep participants obtained.
The findings suggest that doctors may need to look beyond sleep apnea when evaluating patients who complain of daytime sleepiness. Measuring how easily someone falls asleep at night may provide additional clues about future cardiovascular risk.
This study has several important strengths, including a large community-based sample, objective overnight sleep testing, and long-term follow-up. However, the research has so far been presented as a conference abstract rather than a full peer-reviewed paper, so additional details are still limited.
The findings also show an association rather than proving that sleepiness directly causes hypertension. Even so, the study highlights that daytime sleepiness should not always be dismissed as simple tiredness.
When combined with difficulty falling asleep, it may help identify people who could benefit from earlier evaluation and treatment to reduce future cardiovascular risk.
If you care about blood pressure, please read studies about unhealthy habits that could increase high blood pressure risk, and eating eggs in a healthy diet may reduce risks of diabetes, high blood pressure.
For more information about blood pressure, please see recent studies that early time-restricted eating could help improve blood pressure, and results showing 12 foods that lower blood pressure.
Source: Penn State College of Medicine.
