Poor Sleep Drives High Blood Pressure in Teens

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

Teens who sleep fewer than 7.7 hours per night are more likely to have high blood pressure, a new study suggests.

Likewise, those suffering from both insomnia and a lack of sleep are five times more likely to have high blood pressure exceeding 140 systolic, according to research presented Thursday at an American Heart Association (AHA) meeting in New Orleans. (Systolic pressure is the force of your blood against artery walls when your heart beats.)

High blood pressure in teen years could set these kids up for a lifetime of heart health problems, researchers warn.

“While we need to explore this association in larger studies on teens, it is safe to say that sleep health matters for heart health, and we should not wait until adulthood to address it,” said senior researcher Julio Fernandez-Mendoza, director of behavioral sleep medicine at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey, Penn.

For the study, researchers recruited 421 students at three school districts in and around Harrisburg, Penn.

The kids told researchers whether or not they suffer from insomnia, and then stayed overnight in a lab to measure their sleep duration. This information was gathered between 2010 and 2013.

The teens’ blood pressure was taken a few times two to three hours before lights out in the sleep lab.

“We know that disturbed and insufficient sleep is associated with high blood pressure in adults, particularly in adults who report insomnia and sleep objectively less than six hours, but we do not yet know if these associations exist in adolescents,” Fernandez-Mendoza said.

Although the combination of insomnia and poor sleep increased risk of high blood pressure five-fold, teens who reported insomnia but got more than 7.7 hours sleep in the lab didn’t appear to be at risk for either elevated or high blood pressure.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/cardiovascular-diseases/poor-sleep-drives-high-blood-pressure-in-teens