COLLEGE STATE, Penn. — Researchers have discovered that catching up on sleep over the weekend because of sleep loss during the week doesn't return your heart rate and blood pressure level to normal, according to a new study.
"Only 65 percent of adults in the U.S. regularly sleep the recommended seven hours per night, and there's a lot of evidence suggesting that this lack of sleep is associated with cardiovascular disease in the long term," Anne-Marie Chang, co-author and associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, said in a news release Tuesday.
To measure the impact of sleep recovery on cardiovascular health, researchers noted the participants' resting heart rates and blood pressure every two hours during the day. Researchers measured participants' heart rate and blood pressure multiple times throughout the study, also accounting for how the time of day may impact cardiovascular health. Heart rate is naturally lower upon waking than later in the day, and measuring this consecutively can account for this difference, according to the study.