Going to sleep at same time every night can reduce your risk of a stroke

Changing sleep patterns is bad news for your health, say scientists who tracked more than 72,000 volunteers’ sleeping habits using activity trackers over an eight year period

Going to sleep at the same time each night reduces the risk of a stroke, study results suggest.

Scientists tracked more than 72,000 volunteers’ sleeping habits using activity trackers. They then grouped them into regular, moderately irregular and irregular sleepers and monitored their health over eight years.

Irregular sleepers were 26% more likely to suffer a stroke, heart failure or heart attack than regular ones.

Moderately irregular sleepers were 8% more likely.

But crucially, irregular sleepers were at a higher risk of stroke or heart attack even if they got the seven to nine hours the NHS recommends.

Moderately irregular sleepers’ risk, by contrast, was lower if they got the recommended amount.

And regular sleepers were more likely to get enough sleep anyway, with 61% of them managing it while only 48% of irregular sleepers did.

The team, led by Jean-Philippe Chaput of the University of Ottawa in Canada, said: “Our results suggest that sleep regularity may be more relevant than sufficient sleep duration in modulating major adverse cardiovascular event risk.”

Emily McGrath, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said the sleep-heart link was not well understood.

But she added: “Research suggests that disturbed sleep is associated with higher levels of a protein called CRP. This is a sign of inflammation.”