Increased daytime nap frequency may cause higher risk of hypertension, stroke: study

Beijing, China | Xinhua | Chinese researchers have found that increased daytime napping frequency is likely to be a potential causal risk factor for essential hypertension or ischemic stroke.

For middle-aged and elderly people worldwide, hypertension is one of the main causes of death triggered by cardiovascular diseases, and stroke is one of the main causes of disability. Early studies have found that people’s blood pressure will rise after taking a nap.

UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database, collected information on genetics, lifestyle and health conditions from more than 500,000 British volunteers aged 40 to 69, according to the study published in the journal Hypertension.

The research team from the Xiangya Hospital under the Central South University conducted a Cox regression (or Cox proportional hazards regression) analysis on 358,451 participants free of hypertension or stroke from the database.

They conducted relevant studies via Mendelian randomization and found that frequent nappers had 12 percent and 24 percent higher risks of hypertension and ischemic stroke, respectively, compared to those who never took a nap, indicating a positive correlation between daytime napping frequency and the incidence of essential hypertension or stroke.

Wang E, head of the research team, said that although the study was aimed at middle-aged and elderly people in Europe, this study is based on a large database of clinical studies, so it is generally representative.

He added that the internal mechanism of the association between nap and hypertension, stroke and other diseases is still unclear, and needs to be further studied.