{IMAGE}According to a new British study people who do not get the recommended amount of sleep each night are putting themselves at an increased risk of dying.
A study by researchers at University College London and Warwick University has found that lack of sleep can almost double your risk of developing heart disease.
In one of the first studies to discover a link between the duration of a person's sleep and their risk of heart disease, the researchers also found that too much sleep is not good either.
These conclusions were arrived at by analyzing 17 years of data regarding the sleeping patterns of 10,308 civil servants and the associating rate of mortality.
The data was first taken in 1985-88 and then followed up in 1992-93.
Even after other factors such as age, sex, marital status, employment grade, smoking status, physical activity, alcohol consumption, self-rated health, body mass index, blood pressure were taken into account it was still found that those who cut their amount of time sleeping from 7 hours to 5 hours or fewer, were 1.7 fold more likely to die from multiple causes, and were also twice as likely to develop heart disease.
Professor Franceso Cappuccio from Warwick University says fewer hours of sleep and greater levels of sleep disturbance have become widespread in industrialised societies.
Professor Cappuccio says the change which is often the result of cutting down on sleep to create more time for leisure and shift-work, has meant that reports of fatigue, tiredness and excessive daytime sleepiness are more common than a few decades ago.
Cappuccio says sleep represents the daily process of physiological restitution and recovery, and lack of sleep has far-reaching effects.
He says a third of the population of the UK and over 40 percent in the U.S. regularly sleep less than five hours a night, so the problem is not a trivial one.
Sleep experts say the public needs as much information about the need to get proper amounts of sleep as they get concerning diet and exercise and a lack of sleep has been linked to an increased risk of weight gain, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes.
Consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is the best for health and any less may predispose a person to ill-health.
But the researchers also found that those who increased their sleep to eight hours or more a night were more than twice as likely to die during the period of the study as those who had not changed their habit.
The research is due to be presented to the British Sleep Society and will be published in the Journal Sleep.