Impact of bimonthly repeated total sleep deprivation and recovery sleep on cardiovascular indices

Abstract

Since short sleep duration adversely affects cardiovascular (CV) health, we investigated the effects of exposures to total sleep deprivation (TSD), and baseline (BL) and recovery (REC) sleep on CV measures. We conducted a 5‐day experiment at months 2 and 4 in two separate studies (N = 11 healthy adults; 5 females). During these repeated experiments, CV measures [stroke volume (SV), cardiac index (CI), systemic vascular resistance index (SVRI), left ventricular ejection time, heart rate (HR), systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP and DBP) and mean arterial pressure (MAP)] were collected at three assessment time points after: (1) two BL 8 h time‐in‐bed (TIB) sleep opportunity nights; (2) a TSD night; and (3) two REC 8‐10 h TIB nights. CV measures were also collected pre‐study. TSD significantly increased SV and CI, and decreased SVRI, with large effect sizes, which importantly were reversed with recovery, indicating these measures are possible novel biomarkers for assessing the adverse consequences of TSD. Pre‐study SV, CI, SVRI, HR, SBP, and MAP measures also significantly associated with TSD CV responses at months 2 and 4 [Pearson's r: 0.615–0.862; r2: 0.378–0.743], indicating they are robust correlates of future TSD CV responses. Our novel findings highlight the critical impact of sleep on CV health across time.