Now you have a new excuse to hit the snooze button on weekends.
New research finds that people who catch up on zzz’s on the weekends can cut their risk of heart disease by up to 20%.
“Sufficient compensatory sleep is linked to a lower risk of heart disease,” said study co-author Yanjun Song, a researcher with Fuwai Hospital in Beijing. “The association becomes even more pronounced among individuals who regularly experience inadequate sleep on weekdays.”
Song’s team analyzed sleep data from 90,900 UK residents. Nearly 22% — about 19,800 participants — were categorized as sleep-deprived because they slumbered less than seven hours a night on average.
Researchers followed the participants for nearly 14 years, monitoring hospital and death records for cardiac diseases including heart failure, atrial fibrillation and stroke.
The team found that those who logged the most compensatory sleep were 19% less likely to develop heart disease.
Among the sleep-deprived participants, the highest amounts of compensatory sleep meant a 20% lower risk of heart disease.
The data did not reveal differences between men and women.
Dr. Nisha Parikh, director of the Women’s Heart Program for Northwell Health’s Cardiovascular Institute and the Katz Institute for Women’s Health, called the study a “well-conducted analysis.”
“Sleep disorders including sleep deprivation have been linked to cardiometabolic diseases, including hypertension, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases,” Parikh told The Post. “It is reassuring that weekend catch-up sleep can at least partially mitigate the effects of weekday sleep deprivation.”
The research was presented Thursday at the annual European Society of Cardiology (ESC) conference.
“Our results show that for the significant proportion of the population in modern society that suffers from sleep deprivation, those who have the most ‘catch-up’ sleep at weekends have significantly lower rates of heart disease than those with the least,” study co-author Zechen Liu said.
Still, experts recommend adults get seven to nine hours of sleep every night so they don’t find themselves in sleep debt.
Also Thursday at the ESC Congress, researchers from Denmark presented their work that found that women with endometriosis face a 20% greater risk of heart attack and stroke compared with women without endometriosis.
The painful condition, which affects more than 6.5 million American women, occurs when endometrial-like tissue grows outside the uterus.
Meanwhile, men with coronary artery disease — the most common type of heart disease in the US — can cut their risk of a major heart incident by nearly half by quitting smoking for good.
Simply cutting back on cigarettes isn’t enough to move the needle, the study authors from Paris told the ESC Congress.
