Strokes impact sleep quality

NEW YORK (HealthDay News)—Fewer than half of people who survive a stroke will ever have a normal, healthy sleep pattern, new research shows.

Normal sleep is defined as six to eight hours per night. However, most of the nearly 1,600 stroke survivors in the new study slept too much or too little.

“Getting adequate sleep is considered essential for ideal brain and heart health,” said lead author Dr. Sara Hassani of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina.

“We know that abnormally long or short sleep after a stroke can affect recovery and impair quality of life, so these results should prompt us to evaluate these problems and see how we can help people improve their sleep habits,” he added.

His team published their findings in “Neurology.”

Nearly 40,000 adults participated in the new study, and 1,572 of them had survived a stroke. Every two years they were asked about their average sleep time on a work or weekday.

Stroke survivors were less likely to sleep normally compared to people who had never experienced a stroke, and the differences remained relatively stable by age: 32% versus 54%, respectively, for people of 18 to 44 years old; 47% versus 55% for people ages 45 to 64, and 45% versus 54% for people ages 65 and older.

After taking into account risk factors such as hypertension, age and weight, prolonged sleep (more than eight hours) was 54 percent more common among stroke survivors, Hassani’s group reported.

Similarly, short sleep (less than six hours) was 50 percent more likely among stroke survivors than among people without a history of stroke.

“In previous research, stroke has been linked to abnormal sleep, particularly sleep apnea,” Hassani said in a journal news release. “Conditions such as insomnia and excessive sleepiness are common in stroke patients and can occur as a direct or indirect consequence of the stroke itself. “Future research should explore the links between stroke and sleep duration and determine the effect of sleep duration on outcomes after stroke.”

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