For people struggling with high blood pressure, insomnia can be fatal, Italian scientists said at the American Heart Association conference held in Washington on September 19-22.
Dr. Rosa Maria Bruno from the University of Pisa in Italy and her team studied 234 patients suffering from hypertension or resistant arterial hypertension (RHT). Resistant hypertension is a form of the disease in which either the desired blood pressure cannot be obtained despite the simultaneous use of at least three antihypertensive drugs from different groups, taken in optimal doses, or in which for good blood pressure control it is necessary to use 4 drugs with different therapeutic groups.
In the first step, the researchers ‘intention was to assess the participants’ sleep quality and see how any sleep deprivation would translate into their mood. This quality was determined using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), and the symptoms of depression using the so-called Beck’s scale (Beck Depression Inventory, BDI).
It has been found that many patients sleep less than six hours a night. Compared to men, women showed significantly higher PSQI and BDI values, i.e. they reported sleep problems and depressive moods more often. And it was in these people that hypertension took a resistant form that could not be stabilized with drugs.
So the researchers found that too little sleep – and low-quality sleep at that – correlated with the occurrence of resistant hypertension. Patients with sleep disorders struggled with hypertension twice as often as those who slept well, despite taking numerous medications.
“Too short, poor-quality sleep is a very common problem in patients with hypertension,” conclude the authors of the study. – Meanwhile, such a situation is associated with a twofold increase in the risk of resistant hypertension. We suppose that this relationship may be largely due to the presence of depressive symptoms in poor sleepers. “
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