It is proven that people who sleep less have more long-term health problems, such as obesity, diabetes or mental disorders. A study has found that these negative effects of poor rest could be counteracted by practicing the amounts of exercise that the authorities recommend, or even more.
In the research, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the association was taken into account indicating that those who have poorer quality of sleep and do less exercise have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke or cancer. In order to analyze it in depth, tests were carried out on a group of 380,055 people with an average age of 55, who reported on their weekly physical activity and their quality of sleep.
Doing little exercise and sleeping poorly increased the risk of dying from any cause by 57%, the risk of heart disease by 67% and up to 45% more likely to develop cancer
The levels of physical exercise were categorized according to the Metabolic Equivalent of Task (MET) scale, which is equivalent to the calories expended per minute of activity, for example, the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) indicate that it is advisable to perform 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week, equivalent to 600MET.
The ranges in which the participants were classified were: high activity when it was 1200 or more METs, medium in the case of being between 600 and 1200, or low, between 1 and 600. Sleep was distinguished as poor, intermediate or healthy. depending on the chronotype, insomnia, sleep duration, sleepiness or snoring.
Up to 91% increased risk of lung cancer
The final results after doing a dozen different combinations and over a period of more than 11 years, indicated that 56% of the participants had a healthy sleep, 42% of intermediate quality and 3% with poor rest. They found that the lower the sleep score, the higher the risks of death from any cause, from all types of cardiovascular disease, and from ischemic stroke.
Those with little or no exercise and poor sleep had a 57% increased risk of dying from any cause, a 67% increased risk of cardiovascular disease, a 45% increased chance of any cancer, and up to a 91% increased risk of death. % higher risk of lung cancer, compared to those with high physical activity and healthy sleep.
“Physical activity levels at or above the WHO guideline threshold (600 minutes of metabolic equivalent task/week) eliminated most of the deleterious associations of poor sleep with mortality,” the researchers write. Even so, they warn that this study is observational, so a cause-effect relationship cannot be established and further investigation must be carried out.
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