Association says sleep time is essential for heart health

Traditional checklist Life’s Simple 7 by the American Heart Association (AHA), United Statesreceived an eighth item — sleep time — at the end of June as an indicator of cardiovascular health.

The sleep duration metric will now join the checklist created by the nonprofit association in 2010, which includes: diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, body mass, blood lipids, blood sugar, and blood pressure.

In addition, Life’s Simple 8, now renamed Life’s Simple 8, now includes some updates targeting anyone aged two and over to assess optimal cardiovascular health parameters.

in the article “Diet”introduced a new guideline for the individual and population-level assessment of adults and children; inside “Nicotine Exposure”a new accounting of exposure to secondhand smoke and e-cigarettes (vaping); inside “Lipids”Replacing total cholesterol with non-HDL HDL in blood tests, in addition to including glycated hemoglobin A1c to investigate type 2 diabetes.

Why did sleep time get on the AHA list?

The inclusion of sleep in the AHA checklist has been dictated by scientific discoveries made over the past decade. For Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, president of the association, “Sleep affects overall health, and people with healthier sleep patterns more effectively manage health factors such as weight, blood pressure, or risk of type 2 diabetes.”

In Life’s Essential 8, the item “Sleep Time” is measured by average hours of sleep per night. Well, ideal level is seven to nine hours for adults, 10 to 16 hours for children 5 years and younger; 9 to 12 hours of sleep for ages six to 12 and 8 to 10 hours for teens ages 13 to 18.

Sleep duration, among other components of the AHA checklist, can be evaluated by: My Life Check app – Available on Google Play and App Store – It has a scoring system from 0 to 100. The overall cardiovascular health score is the sum of the average scores for the eight items.