While it is well known that exercise, a healthy diet, not smoking and moderate alcohol consumption help protect the body against heart disease, a new study has found that the benefits of these lifestyle choices may be increased by a good night's sleep.

This is the first study to assess sleep's impact on these lifestyle factors in relation to heart disease.

European scientists followed the progress of over 6,600 men and 7,900 women, aged between 20 and 65. None of the participants had heart disease at the beginning of the study and all were monitored for an average of 12 years.

Not surprisingly, anyone who maintained even one of the four lifestyle factors reduced their risk of developing heart disease and the more healthy lifestyle choices that they followed, the more they reduced their risk.

Overall, if people managed all four - exercise, healthy diet, not smoking and moderate alcohol consumption - they had a 57% reduced risk of developing heart disease and a 67% reduced risk of suffering a fatal event.

However, the study found that if they also managed to get ‘sufficient sleep', which was defined as a minimum of seven hours per night, their risk of developing heart disease fell even more.

Sufficient sleep, along with the four lifestyle factors, reduced the overall risk of heart disease by 65% and reduced the risk of a fatal event by 83%.

"If all participants adhered to all five healthy lifestyle factors, 36% of cardiovascular disease and 57% of fatal cardiovascular disease could theoretically be prevented or postponed. The public health impact of sufficient sleep duration, in addition to the traditional healthy lifestyle factors, could be substantial," the scientists said.

They noted that short sleep duration has been linked previously with a higher incidence of health problems such as overweight, obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. As a result, these findings are ‘consistent with the hypothesis that short sleep duration is directly associated with cardiovascular disease risk'.

According to lead scientist, Dr Monique Verschuren from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, the importance of getting enough sleep ‘should now be mentioned as an additional way to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease'.

"It is always important to confirm results, but the evidence is certainly growing that sleep should be added to our list of cardiovascular disease risk factors. Seven hours is likely to be sufficient for most people," she added.

Details of these findings are published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

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