Short night-time sleep linked to peripheral artery disease

Editor's Note

This study from Sweden finds that sleeping less than 5 hours a night is associated with an increased likelihood of developing peripheral artery disease (PAD), compared with sleeping 7 to 8 hours.

The study included more than 650,000 participants and was conducted in two parts. The first analyzed the associations of sleep duration and daytime napping with the risk of PAD. The second involved the use of genetic data to perform naturally randomized controlled trials (ie, Mendelian randomization) to examine causality of the associations.

In observational analyses of 53,416 Swedish adults, sleeping less than 5 hours was associated with a nearly doubled risk of PAD, compared with 7 to 8 hours, and sleeping 8 hours or more was associated with a 24% higher risk of PAD compared with 7 to 8 hours. Similar results were reported for napping--daytime nappers had a 32% higher risk of PAD, compared with nonnappers. These findings were supported by further analyses in 156, 582 and 452,028 individuals.

In the causal studies, short sleep was associated with an increased risk of PAD, and PAD was associated with an increased likelihood of short sleep. No causal relationships were found between long sleep and PAD or between napping and PAD.

The researchers concluded that short sleep duration is associated with an increased risk of PAD.