Do you prefer to stay up late, enjoying the night while everyone else falls asleep?
You may be harming your heart health, says a new study.
Middle-aged and older night owls appear to have worse heart health, likely due to unhealthy lifestyle habits, researchers reported today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Night owls may be more likely to have behaviors that affect cardiovascular health, such as poorer diet quality, smoking, and insufficient or irregular sleep,” said lead researcher Sina Kianersi in a press release. He is a sleep and circadian disorders researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Night owls were 79% more likely to have a low overall heart health score, compared with people with average sleep patterns, according to the researchers. In this case, “average” means that people don’t typically stay up late or get up very early.
As a result, night owls had a 16% higher risk of heart attack or stroke over approximately 14 years of follow-up, according to the researchers.
In contrast, night owls were 5% less likely to have a low heart health score compared to the rest, according to the researchers.
These results were found among more than 300,000 people with an average age of 57 who participated in the UK Biobank, a long-term health study in the United Kingdom.
Of those people, around 8% said they were definitely evening people, with bedtimes that often occurred after midnight.
Another 24% were early birds, with bedtimes earlier in the evening, and 67% fell somewhere in between those two extremes.
“Evening people often experience circadian misalignment, meaning their internal biological clock may not align with the natural day-to-night light cycle or their usual daily schedules,” Kianeri said.
The results showed that being a night owl tended to affect women’s heart health scores more than men’s.
The study found that approximately 75% of a night owl’s increased risk was explained by lifestyle habits.
However, the news isn’t all bad.
Because the risk is largely due to poor choices, night owls aren’t doomed to poor heart health, said Kristen Knutson, volunteer chair of an American Heart Association statement on circadian patterns and heart health. She was not involved in the study.
