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Chronic Sleep Disruption Leads to Heart, Kidney Disease

Shift workers, flight crews, truck drivers, emergency and medical personnel, and even patients in intensive care units don’t often get a full night’s uninterrupted sleep. And for a lot of people, a full night’s sleep occurs during the day.

A lifestyle of sleeping during the day, in ever-changing shifts, or with many interruptions during the sleep cycle has been known for quite some time to cause neuropsychological issues such as impaired performance and flawed memory. Now, a new study seems to indicate there is a significantly increased likelihood of developing cardiovascular and kidney diseases as well.

Our circadian rhythms represent a kind of hard-wired regulatory system of the sleep-wake cycle experienced in a 24-hour period and which is closely linked to nature’s cycle of daylight and darkness. During sleep, which is most beneficial when enjoyed during the night, the body devotes its energies to tissue repair and replacement. When interruptions occur during sleep, the renewal process is interrupted, too, causing damage to organs such as the heart and kidneys.

Researchers in Toronto have just released the details of studies they’ve done, using hamsters, to evaluate the degree of damage done to organ tissue when the hamsters’ sleep cycles are chronically out of sync with external stimuli, such as light and darkness. The sleep-deprived hamsters developed cardiomyopathy, or dangerously enlarged hearts, and substantial scarring of kidney tubules. Researchers suggest other organs could be damaged, too.

The research team, led by Dr. Michael Sole, Professor of Medicine and Physiology at the University of Toronto and founding director of the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, suggests their research be used to develop more constant working schedules for shift workers, as long as a month or more, in order to allow the body to safely readjust its internal clock and minimize the undesirable health effects of such schedules.

Full details of the Toronto sleep study can be found in the April edition of the American Journal of Physiology - Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. The study was funded by the A. Ephraim and Shirley Diamond Cardiomyopathy Research Fund and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Source: University Health Network

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