Health warning issued to people who sleep less than seven hours a night

There's a new health warning for people who don't get at least seven hours of sleep a night, and it's worth listening to.

I'll level with you, dear reader, I'm something of a night owl and absolutely do not get enough sleep, even though every night I tell myself this is the time I'll get my head down for a sensible eight hours.

It basically never happens, and I might be setting myself up to pay quite the price further down the line if a new study has anything to say about it.

According to PA, if you're getting less than seven hours of sleep a night you've got a seven percent higher risk of developing high blood pressure over time.

Meanwhile, if you're like me and make the catastrophically unwise decision to get less than five hours of sleep on some nights, then it's an 11 percent higher risk.

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These are preliminary findings shown at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session.

Kaveh Hosseini, assistant professor of cardiology at Iran's Tehran Heart Center, discussed the study's findings that women appeared to be at a seven percent higher risk compared to men.

He said: "Getting too little sleep appears to be riskier in females.

"The difference is statistically significant, though we are not sure it’s clinically significant and should be further studied.

"What we do see is that lack of good sleep patterns may increase the risk of high blood pressure, which we know can set the stage for heart disease and stroke."

To gather this information, researchers studied over a million people in total from six different countries who did not have high blood pressure when tests began.

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These 1,044,035 people were followed for an average of five years each, and the study adjusted for heart disease risk, sex, education, smoking status and weight.

In this way they were able to find that not getting enough sleep appeared to correlate with a higher blood pressure.

If you're having trouble with your sleep then the study's researchers reckon you should go and see the doctor to talk about what might be done.

However, professor Hosseini said there needed to be more research done into the link between sleep and very unhealthy conditions such as high blood pressure.

His advice to people who wanted to make the most of their time in the land of nod was to get 'seven to eight hours of sleep' a night.