Sleeping in on the weekend, to compensate for disrupted sleep during the week, protects the heart, according to a study that might be welcomed by many tired Australians.

Specifically, catching up on sleep at the weekend could reduce the risk of heart disease by 20 per cent.

This is compared to people who had disrupted sleep, and didn’t try to compensate for it.

The study has been described, in a newsletter from Medical News Today, as groundbreaking, striking and surprising. This is because its findings are at odds with much previous research.

But overall, the findings aren’t as contradictory to prevailing thought as they first seem. The true message is: Sleeping in is better than nothing.

What happened in the study

The study, from China’s National Centre for Cardiovascular Disease, was presented at this year’s European Society of Cardiology Congress.

The authors used data from 90,903 participants in the UK Biobank.

To evaluate the relationship between compensated weekend sleep and heart disease, sleep data was recorded using accelerometers.

Participants were grouped into one of four cohorts, from those who got the least compensated sleep, to those who got the most.

Sleep deprivation was self-reported. Sleep deprivation was defined as having less than seven hours a night.

A total of 19,816 (21.8 per cent) of participants were defined as sleep deprived.

The rest of the cohort “may have experienced occasional inadequate sleep, but on average, their daily hours of sleep did not meet the criteria for sleep deprivation”.

The authors recognised this as a limitation to their data.

Hospital records and cause of death registry information were used to diagnose cardiac diseases. These included ischaemic heart disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke.

The results

A median follow-up of almost 14 years found that those with daily sleep deprivation and the most compensatory sleep had a 20 per cent lower risk of developing heart disease than those with the least.

In other words, those who were most sleep-deprived, and slept more on the weekends, enjoyed the greater benefit.

“Sufficient compensatory sleep is linked to a lower risk of heart disease,” study co-author Yanjun Song said.

“The association becomes even more pronounced among individuals who regularly experience inadequate sleep on weekdays.”

Previous research

For a long time, sleeping in on the weekend, to catch up on missed sleep, was thought to offer no benefit.

Why not? Because we need to maintain a consistent sleep pattern of seven to nine hours a night to protect our hearts, metabolism and mental health.

Advice about how much sleep we need, those seven to nine hours, is usually described as an average.

For some people that means sleeping five to six hours a night during the week, and adding a few extra hours on the weekend. This leaves a sleep debt that never gets paid.

Since last year, the American Heart Association has included sleep as one of eight measures used to assess heart health and predict disease. The Australian Heart Foundation is following suit.

Getting real

In 2019, a devastating study was published by the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory, at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

It was widely reported. An article from the Harvard Medical School, said the study found “our sleep is not very forgiving of being moved around to more convenient times”.

Participants who cut sleep by five hours during the week, and made it up on the weekend, “still paid a cost”.

That included excess calorie intake after dinner, reduced energy expenditure, and increased weight.

However, other studies have found that compensatory weekend sleep reduces some of the negative health effects of poor weekday sleep.   

A 2018 study, found that people who slept in on weekends “had no greater risk of mortality than those who slept a regular six to seven hours a night”.

Take away: Sleeping in helps , but it’s not the healthiest way to order your life. Still, it’s better than nothing.