In a new study, researchers found a daytime nap taken once or twice a week may lower the risk of having a heart attack/stroke.
But no such association found for either greater frequency or duration of naps.
The research was conducted by a team at the University Hospital of Lausanne.
The impact of napping on heart health has been hotly contested.
Many of the published studies on the topic have failed to consider the napping frequency, or focused purely on cardiovascular disease deaths, or compared regular nappers with those not opting for a mini siesta.
In a bid to try and address these issues, they looked at the association between napping frequency and average nap duration and the risk of heart attack, stroke, or heart failure, among 3462 randomly selected residents of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Each participant was aged between 35 and 75 when recruited between 2003 and 2006 to the study.
Over half (58%, 2014) of the participants said they didn’t nap during the previous week; around one in five (19%, 667) said they took one to two naps; around one in 10 (12%, 411) said they took three to five; while a similar proportion (11%, 370) said they took six to seven.
Frequent nappers (3-7 naps a week) tended to be older, male, smokers, weigh more, and to sleep for longer at night than those who said they didn’t nap during the day.
And they reported more daytime sleepiness and more severe obstructive sleep apnea — a condition in which the walls of the throat relax and narrow during sleep, interrupting normal breathing.
During the monitoring period, there were 155 fatal and non-fatal heart disease ‘events’.
The team says occasional napping, once to twice weekly, was associated with an almost halving in attack/stroke/heart failure risk (48%) compared with those who didn’t nap at all.
The team says nap frequency may help to explain the differing conclusions reached by researchers about the impact of napping on heart health.
One author of the study is Nadine Häusler.
The study is published in Heart.
Copyright © 2020 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
