Sleeping at least seven hours every night can reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke, a new study finds.
Research conducted on mice showed that rodents who didn't get enough shut-eye were more likely to develop atherosclerosis, a disease in which plaque builds up on the inner walls of the arteries.
Previous studies have found that a lack of sleep increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, but researchers haven't been able to explain how.
The team, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says its study is the first to show that a region of the brain involved in sleep is linked to bone marrow and can raise the production of white blood cells known to cause atherosclerosis.
A new study has found that getting less than seven hours of sleep each night can raise your risk of developing atherosclerosis, a disease in which plaque builds up on the inner walls of the arteries (file image)
The National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep every night.
However, a 2015 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that about 50 percent of US adults sleep fewer than the recommended hours.
Insufficient sleep has been shown to raise the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and even cancer - but researchers don't know much about the underlying mechanisms that cause this.
'We started with the premise that we know sleep is good for your heart, good for cardiovascular health, and sleep disruption is bad for your health and we’ve known this for a long time,' senior author Dr Filip Swirski, an associate professor at Massachusetts General and Harvard Medical School, told DailyMail.com.
'Our question was: "How?" We
