Poor Sleeping Patterns May Increase Asthma Risk: Study

Washington: Most of us know that irregular sleeping patterns can lead to a number of health issues and could increase stress levels exponentially, it could also increase asthma risk.

A decade-long study has suggested that regularly enjoying a good night’s sleep could significantly reduce your risk of developing asthma, which affects about 300 million people worldwide.

The findings, which were first published in the journal BMJ Open Respiratory Research, revealed that poor sleeping patterns may bolster genetic susceptibility to asthma and could potentially double the risk of being diagnosed with the inflammatory disease.

Meanwhile, a healthy sleep pattern has been linked to a lower risk of asthma, which suggests that detecting and treating sleep disorders early on may lessen the risk.

Making use of the data provided by the UK Biobank study, a team from Shandong University in China examined 455,405 people aged 38 to 73 and developed a model of risk and sleep traits after following the participants for more than a decade.

People were asked about their sleeping patterns at the start of the study. They were also asked whether they were a morning person or a night owl, how long they usually sleep, whether they snored, had insomnia and whether they experienced excessive sleepiness during the daytime.

The study defines a healthy sleep pattern as being more of a morning person, never having insomnia or experiencing it rarely, sleeping for seven to nine hours a night, no snoring and no frequent sleepiness during the day. The genetic makeup of all these in the study was mapped, and an asthma risk score was drawn up.

About one in every three participants was found to have a high genetic risk of developing asthma, a third had an intermediate risk and another third had a low risk. In total, 17,836 people were diagnosed with asthma.

“These results showed that a healthy sleep pattern could significantly decrease asthma risk in any genetic subgroup,” the researchers wrote. “Unhealthy sleep patterns and sleep traits … were significantly associated with the risk of asthma in adults.

The combination of poor sleep pattern and high susceptibility could lead to additive asthma risk.” “A healthier sleep pattern could be beneficial in asthma prevention regardless of genetic conditions,” the researchers concluded.