A new research published in the journal BMC Public Health suggests that both, sleeping too much and sleeping too little might be bad for our health. Scientists claim that thinking one could skip sleep during the weekdays and then catching up on it during the weekends is completely wrong. If you’re not getting just the right amount of sleep it might lead to severe health problems such as high blood pressure and increased cholesterol levels. For the research, a team from the Seoul National University College of Medicine worked with the data of 1,33,608 Korean mean and women between the age of 40 and 69.
Actually, the information about the sleeping patterns were originally collected as a part of a HEXA (The Health Examinees) study. The Hexa study had collected data over the course of nine years starting from 2004. For this study, the sleeping patterns of 44,930 men and 88,678 were divided into four categories: less than six hours of sleep, between six to eight hours of sleep, between eight to ten hours of sleep and more than ten hours of sleep. The results were quite interesting. Men who slept for less than six hours a night were more at a risk of developing metabolic syndrome than those who were sleeping for eight hours. Metabolic syndrome consists of a lot of severe health conditions including high blood sugar, high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure and high amount of belly fat, which can lead to even more health complications. Men and women who were sleeping for less than 6 hours were also more likely to have more amount of belly fat.
Since past researches have always indicated that getting less sleep is the devil, people for a long time have assumed that getting more than 8 hours of sleep must be healthy. The results of the research proved that it isn’t so. Men and women who were sleeping for 10 something hours weren’t safe from being at a risk for metabolic syndrome. Research states that women who sleep for 10 hours may have excess fat around their stomach. Claire E. Kim, lead author of the research said, “This is the largest study examining a dose-response association between sleep duration and metabolic syndrome and its components separately for men and women”.