Sleep is a crucial activity but too much or too little of it can pose a threat to the life of elderly women. A new study claims that too much or too less of sleep, more than 9 hours or less than 6 hours can increase the risk of a stroke in the older women.
Heavy sleepers are at higher risk than women who don't get enough sleep, the study suggests.
An ischemic stroke is caused by a hindrance in blood supply due to blockage in an arterydefine that supplies blood to the heart and is the most common type of stroke experienced by older women who sleep for long hours.
According to the researchers those postmenopausal women who dozed more than nine hours per night were 70% more vulnerable to an ischemic stroke.
The women who slept an average of seven hours each night had minimal chances to suffer from stoke.
And women who slept for the duration of six hours or less a night were at 14% risk of getting a stroke compared with women who slept for an average of seven hours per night.
In a news release, researcher Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, PhD of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City remarked, "What we don't know is whether the longer sleep time was the reason for the increased risk or whether there was some other factor that both led people to sleep more and was also a risk factor for stroke. It does mean that people who sleep excessively long hours habitually (or who sleep less than six hours habitually), should discuss this with their doctors and be sure to lower their other risk factors for stroke, especially high blood pressure."
As per the researchers of the study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association, the risk of stroke tends to increase among those women who sleep more or less than an average of seven hours per night.
The study looked at 93,175 women aged 50 to 79 years, and observed how sleeping pattern affected the stroke risk and researchers found out that a strong link prevailed between sleeping pattern and the stroke risk.
Researcher Jiu-Chiuan Chen, MD, ScD., assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health in Chapel Hill said, "This study provides additional evidence that habitual sleep patterns in postmenopausal women could be important for determining the risk of ischemic stroke."
Chen further reminds that the study holds good only in case of postmenopausal women and cannot be applied effectively to other categories of women.
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