SLEEP DURATION HAS AN INDEPENDENT ASSOCIATION WITH 24-HOUR BLOOD PRESSURE LEVEL AND BLOOD PRESSURE VARIABILITY

Abstract

Objective: Sleep quantity and quality have been known to be associated with blood pressure (BP) or the risk of incident hypertension. However, there have been few studies regarding the effect of sleep duration and quality on blood pressure variability (BPV).

Design and method: We analyzed the data of 4,002 participants of the Korean ambulatory BP (KOR-ABP) registry. The average real variability (ARV) of systolic and diastolic BP was analyzed as an index for 24-hour BPV. Sleep duration was calculated with the participants’ record and sleep quality was categorized as the participants’ subjective evaluation.

Results: The mean age was 54.7 ± 15.0 years and 2,183 (54.5%) participants were men. 2,357 patients had hypertension (58.9%), of whom 1,279 (54.3%) were taking anti-hypertensive medication. Mean sleep duration was 7:09 ± 1:42 hours and mean 24-hour systolic and diastolic BP were 135.3 ± 16.7 and 84.4 ± 11.4 mmHg, respectively. There were significant differences in mean 24-hour BP and BPV among the participants who slept < 7 hour, 7 ∼ 8 hours and ≥ 8 hours. In multivariate analysis, short sleep duration (< 7 hours) is associated with higher risk of having increased 24-hour systolic and diastolic BP as well as BPV even after adjusting age, sex, clinic BP, and anti-hypertension medication.

Conclusions: Short sleep duration is associated with increased 24-hour BP levels and has an independent influence on BPV. This finding can explain the adverse clinical outcome related with short sleep duration.