The experts defined a sleep duration of 7 to less than 9 hours per day as normal, while outside this range it was considered too little or too much.
Courtesy | The UK Biobank study, published in BMJ Open, assessed the risk of developing glaucoma in people with different sleep habits.
Poor sleep has been shown on many occasions to be quite harmful to health, from physical to mental. Now, new research warns that poor-quality sleep, which includes both too much and too little sleep, daytime sleepiness or snoring, might cause irreversible vision loss caused by glaucoma.
The UK Biobank study, published in BMJ Open, assessed the risk of developing glaucoma in people with different sleep habits, such as sleeping too little or too much, suffering from insomnia, having nocturnal or morning chronotypes (popularly known as ‘owls’ or ‘larks’), present daytime sleepiness and utter snores.
In this study, they selected 409,053 participants in the UK Biobank, who were between the ages of 40 and 69 in 2006-10 when they were recruited, and who had self-reported their sleep behaviours.
“Short or long duration sleep was associated with an 8% increased risk of glaucoma; insomnia with 12% more; snoring 4% more, and frequent daytime sleepiness 20% more,” the article noted.
The experts defined a sleep duration of 7 to less than 9 hours per day as normal, while outside this range it was considered too little or too much.
For its part, glaucoma is characterized by a progressive loss of light-sensitive cells in the eye and deterioration of the optic nerve. The causes and factors that contribute to the development of this disease are not entirely clear, but if patients do not receive adequate treatment it can progress to irreversible blindness. Currently, glaucoma is one of the main causes of blindness worldwide and it is estimated that it will affect around 112 million people in 2040.
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