Washington: Taking a nap during daytime can not only refresh you but also lower the risk of heart attack or stroke if taken once or twice in a week, found a new study. The impact of napping on heart health has been hotly contested since many of the published studies on the topic have failed to consider napping frequency, or focused purely on cardiovascular disease deaths, or compared regular nappers with those not opting for a mini siesta.
In the study published in the Journal ‘Heart’, researchers looked at the association between napping frequency and average nap duration and the risk of fatal and non-fatal cardiovascular disease ‘events,’ such as heart attack, stroke, or heart failure, among 3462 randomly selected residents of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Each participant was aged between 35 and 75 when recruited between 2003 and 2006 to the CoLaus study. The first check-up took place between 2009 and 2012 when information on their sleep and nap patterns in the previous week was collected, and their health was then subsequently monitored for an average of 5 years. Over half (58 per cent, 2014) of the participants said they didn’t nap during the previous week; around one in five (19 per cent, 667) said they took one to two naps; around one in 10 (12 per cent, 411) said they took three to five; while a similar proportion (11 per cent, 370) said they took six to seven.
