After studying records spanning 20 years, Swedish reporters have come to the conclusion that setting your clock back by an hour on Sundays resulted in lesser incidents of heart attacks on Mondays. This was concluded to be because of the extra hour of sleep people got.
In the spring season however, the effect was exactly the opposite. After daylight saving time started, there was a rise in the number of people having heart attacks through the week days, especially the first three days.
According to the New York Presbyterian Hospital’s director of preventive cardiology, Dr.Lori Mosca, sleep affects the health of our hearts through a variety of mechanical processes. The description of this extensive study was provided in a letter which was published by Karolinska Institute’s Dr.Imre Janszky and the National Board of Health and Welfare, Sweden’s Dr.Rickard Ljung in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
It was Janszky who initiated this research after he faced certain adjustment problems last spring. He has also been a part of other such studies on health and sleep. This study was conducted with the help of Sweden’s heart attack registry which is quite comprehensive. A detailed study was conducted on whether changes in the internal clock of the body due to sleep disruptions caused heart attacks between the years 1987 and 2006.
Finding revealed significant relationship between sleep and heart attack patterns. According to Janszky, though Sweden had relatively less number of heart attacks, he expected the results to be approximately the same everywhere.
