14 DAY TRIAL // A group of researchers from the University Hospital of Linköping, in Sweden, determined in a new study that people with a diagnostic of heart failure tend to get hospitalized very often if they also experience lower-quality sleep patterns. Patients in this group visit hospitals two times more often than peers with similar health conditions, but who manage to rest well during the night.
These results were recently presented at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology. The research effort was led by Dr. Peter Johansson and included data collected from the Outcomes of Advising and Counselling in Heart failure (COACH) study. A total of 499 patients were included in this research, all of whom had been hospitalized for their heart conditions at one point or another.
Emerging research suggests that poor sleep can have a host of negative side-effects on a number of aspects related to human health, including obesity and depression. This study suggests that cardiac health may be influenced by insufficient or disturbed sleep. For this study, scientists analyzed physical functioning, mental health, and sleep patterns for all test participants.
The question the team asked of all patients was “Was your sleep restless?” This question is derived from the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). After their initial hospitalization, patients were again followed up with 12 months later. Scientists asked them about instances of unplanned hospitalizations and again assessed participants' sleep patterns.
“Sleep is important for everyone and we all have to sleep to feel good. We know that sleep problems are common among patients with heart failure. But until now there was no data on whether poor sleep persists over time and how that relates to hospitalizations,” Johansson explains.
“Our study shows that some patients with heart failure have chronic sleep problems and this more than doubles their risk of unplanned hospitalizations. We need to ask all our heart failure patients whether they sleep well and if not, find out why,” the team leader adds, quoted by PsychCentral.
The follow up study revealed that around one third of the 499 participants displayed continued sleep problems a year after their initial hospitalization. A total of 215 patients, or 43 percent of the study group, displayed similar problems for shorter periods of time, right after first being released from the hospital.
“Our finding that consistently poor sleep leads to twice as many hospitalizations in patients with heart failure underlines the impact that sleep can have on health. In Sweden we don’t generally ask our heart failure patients about sleep and this study shows that we should. If patients say their sleep is poor that may be a warning signal to investigate the reasons,” Johansson concludes.