We all know how hard it can be to stay on top of a good night’s sleep during the work week. To move past fatigue, we might find ourselves catching up on sleep during our days off. Even though sleeping in on the weekend to catch up on z’s is a time-honored tradition, we still don’t know much about its health consequences. But a new study suggests hitting snooze on the weekends may do a body some good, especially when it comes to cardiovascular health.
Researchers in Beijing probed the relationship between sleeping in on the weekends and the risk of cardiovascular disease in over 90,000 people. They will present their research on September 1 at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2024 session “Exploring cardiovascular health: lifestyle, economics, and disparities.” They found that the group of people who got the most sleep on weekends were nearly one-fifth less likely to develop heart disease compared to those who got the least.
The authors analyzed sleep data from 90,903 people who participated in the UK Biobank project, a large-scale biomedical database that contains lifestyle, health, and genetic information from about 500,000 participants. They divided the 90,903 subjects into four roughly equal groups by the amount of sleep they got during the week and weekends, which had been recorded using accelerometers. The first quartile was the least compensated, actually losing between 16 and 0.26 hours of sleep on the weekends, while the fourth quartile caught up on the most sleep during the weekend, making up 1.28 to 16 hours.
Then, using a median follow-up of about 14 years, the authors examined hospitalization and death records to track diagnoses of ischemic heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke. Upon comparing the fourth quartile to the first, the researchers found that those who caught up on sleep the most during the weekend were 19 percent less likely to experience a cardiovascular event or diagnosis. In other words, there’s a clear link between compensatory sleep on the weekend and lower risk of heart disease.
The authors also emphasized that this link was even more pronounced in people who sleep poorly during the week. This connection suggests that catching up on sleep during the weekends can confer benefits. The next time you think you’re lazy for spending your weekend on sleep, know that you’re doing your heart a favor.
