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When you don’t get enough good sleep, the short-term consequences are noticeable — maybe you’re distracted at work or snappy with loved ones. But in the background, irregular and poor-quality sleeping patterns could increase your risk for developing cardiovascular disease, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

“This study is one of the first investigations to provide evidence of a connection between irregular sleep duration and irregular sleep timing and atherosclerosis,” said lead study author Kelsie Full, an assistant professor of medicine in the epidemiology division at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

Atherosclerosis is the buildup of plaque in arteries, according to the American Heart Association. This plaque is made up of cholesterol, fatty substances, cellular waste products, calcium and fibrin, a clotting agent in the blood. As plaque accumulates, blood vessel walls thicken, which reduces blood flow and therefore diminishes the amount of oxygen and other nutrients reaching the rest of the body. Atherosclerosis can lead to cardiovascular health conditions, including coronary heart disease, angina, heart attacks, strokes and carotid or peripheral artery disease.

Poor sleep — including poor quality, abnormal quantity and fragmented sleep — has been linked with cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular disease-related deaths before, but less had been known about the specific associations between sleep regularity and atherosclerosis.

Sleep regularity, the new study’s authors defined, is estimated by variations in sleep duration (how long someone sleeps each night) and sleep timing (the time when someone falls asleep nightly) — the fewer variations the better.

The authors set out to learn more about this relationship by analyzing the sleep of older adults — age 69 on average — who participated in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, a longitudinal cohort study designed to investigate the prevalence and progression of, and risk factors for, cardiovascular disease. More than 2,000 participants were recruited between 2000 and 2002 from Minnesota, Maryland, Illinois, North Carolina, California and New York state.

During sleep assessments conducted between 2010 and 2013, participants kept a sleep diary over seven consecutive days and wore a wristwatch that tracked their sleep and wake history. Participants also underwent an at-home sleep study to measure breathing, sleep stages, waking during the night and heart rate.

After participants’ cardiovascular health was assessed during the same time frame, the researchers found those with irregular sleep durations — those that varied by 90 minutes to more than two hours within a week — were about 1.4 times more likely to have high coronary artery calcium scores compared with those with more consistent sleep durations. (This calcium score measures the amount of calcified plaque in arteries; a higher number increases the risk of some cardiovascular conditions.) The former group was also more likely to have carotid plaque and abnormal results from a test assessing blood vessel stiffness.

“These results suggest that maintaining regular or habitual sleep durations, or sleeping close to the same total amount of time each night,” Full said, “may play an important role in preventing cardiovascular disease.”

Since sleep quality and atherosclerosis were measured at the same time, researchers weren’t able to assess or prove whether irregular sleep caused the condition — they found only an association between the two.

The findings of the study published Wednesday could be due to both a direct link between sleep and the heart, and/or other lifestyle factors.

“People with less sleep or irregular patterns do tend to have less healthy patterns in other lifestyles (like diet and physical activity),” Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said via email. Lloyd-Jones wasn’t involved in the study.

“Sleep is critical for the heart to be able to rest, as that is when heart rate slows and blood pressure normally dips,” he added. “Without that regular rest, the heart and vascular system are stressed over time.”

Whatever interrupts a person’s sleep could result in changes that affect the heart, said Dr. Andrew Freeman, director of cardiovascular prevention and wellness at National Jewish Health in Denver. Freeman wasn’t involved in the research.

“Interrupted sleep — especially (in) those with sleep apnea — usually releases catecholamines like adrenaline, which can do all sorts of things if it’s a chronic problem,” Freeman said. Sleep interruptions can also be a sign of increased stress or anxiety, he added.

Still, the study’s findings were in participants with no history of cardiovascular disease, so everyone should take heed, Lloyd-Jones said.

“Sleep matters to all of us,” he added. “It is an important part of the Life’s Essential 8 approach to optimizing your cardiovascular health — which can also help prevent cancers, dementia and many other chronic diseases of aging.”

Life’s Essential 8 is the American Heart Association’s checklist for lifelong good health, which also includes eating healthy, being physically active, quitting tobacco, managing weight, controlling cholesterol and managing blood sugar and blood pressure.

The association recommends adults get seven to nine hours of sleep each night, which is more likely if you have sound sleep hygiene. That involves going to bed at the same time each night, waking at the same time daily, avoiding caffeine after late morning, using your bedroom for sleep and intimacy only, avoiding screen usage before bed and sleeping in a dark, quiet and cool room.

“I also recommend keeping a notebook next to the bed,” Freeman said. “Then when people wake up in the middle of the night, (they should) write down what comes to mind first. It could be they heard a bird or they had to pee or they had some stressor on their mind. And that may be a focus for when they meditate or do something mindful.”

If you have sleep apnea or persistent sleep issues, seek treatment from a sleep specialist or other clinician.

CNN
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Rep. Angie Craig’s office released audio Friday of threatening, vulgar phone calls it said it received after the Minnesota Democrat was physically assaulted in her apartment building in Washington, DC, earlier this month.

One of the callers said, “Finally this piece of sh*t gets accosted. … You deserved it.”

Another caller said, “I hope it happens to you again, because you deserve it. And don’t call the police for help.”

Craig’s office said the disturbing calls and threats came after a segment on Fox News’ “The Five” addressed her attack by a man in her apartment building’s elevator six days earlier. In the segment, the hosts bashed previous efforts by some Democrats to “defund the police”.

“Fox News’ ‘The Five’ launched a new round of false attacks on Rep. Craig’s record during their Wednesday afternoon show, working from opposition research released earlier in the day by the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee),” her office said in a news release.

CNN has reached out to Fox News and the NRCC for comment.

“Now that the congresswoman has been victimized, now she feels your pain? Nonsense,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on the segment. “And for those who say ‘at least now she’s on our side.’ Baloney.”

“You’ve done your damage, stick with it,” Pirro added. “Defund the police as it relates to you.”

Craig’s office said she has always been an opponent of defunding police and has worked to support law enforcement.

The threatening phone calls are being reported to US Capitol Police, Craig’s office said.

The man who allegedly attacked Craig made his initial appearance in federal court Monday, where he did not enter a plea.

According to court documents, Kendrid Hamlin followed Craig into her apartment building’s elevator and blocked her from exiting the elevator after she refused to let him use her restroom. When she tried to move past him, he allegedly punched the congresswoman in her face and held her from reaching the elevator keypad.

Craig then threw a hot coffee she was carrying at Hamlin, who then let go of her, the documents said. She was able to leave the elevator when the doors opened and yell for help.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has condemned the attack and said he asked the House sergeant at arms and the US Capitol Police to assure her safety in Washington, DC, and in Minnesota.

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With the thick vegetation of the northern Guatemala rainforests hiding its 2,000-year-old remnants, the full extent of the early Mayan way of life was once impossible to see. But laser technology has helped researchers discover a previously unknown 650-square-mile (1,683-square-kilometer) Maya site that offers startling new insights about ancient Mesoamericans and their civilization.

The researchers detected the vast site within the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin of northern Guatemala by using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, a laser mapping system that allows for structures to be detected below the thick tree canopies. The resulting map showed an area composed of 964 settlements broken down into 417 interconnected Mayan cities, towns and villages.

A 110-mile (177-kilometer) network of raised stone trails, or causeways, that linked the communities reveals that the early civilization was home to an even more complex society than previously thought, according to a recent analysis on the architecture groupings, published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.

“They’re the world’s first superhighway system that we have,” said lead study author Richard Hansen, a professor of anthropology at Idaho State University. “What’s amazing about (the causeways) is that they unite all these cities together like a spiderweb … which forms one of the earliest and first state societies in the Western Hemisphere.”

The causeways, which rise above the seasonal swamps and dense forest flora of the Maya Lowlands, formed “a web of implied social, political, and economic interactions” with further implications regarding “strategies of governance” due to how difficult they would have been to build, according to the study.

The causeways were composed of a mixture of mud and quarry stone among several layers of limestone cement. Mayans likely made the elevated pathways with a process similar to the one they used to build their pyramids — by creating 10- to 15-foot (3- to 4.5-meter) stone boxes, then filling, stacking and leveling them off, according to Hansen. Several of these causeways were as wide as 131 feet (40 meters), nearly half the length of an American football field.

In Maya language, the word for causeway is “Sacebe” which translates to “white road.” On top of the raised roads was a thick layer of white plaster, which would have helped to increase visibility in the night as the plaster reflected moonlight, Hansen said.

“They didn’t have any pack animals in the Maya region … and we’re not thinking that they had wheeled vehicles on these causeways like Roman roads, like chariots or whatnot, but they were definitely built for people to interact, communicate and probably travel between sites,” said Marcello Canuto, anthropology professor and director of the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University.

Canuto, who was not involved in this study, was co-director on research that used the same LiDAR technology to reveal over 60,000 ancient Mayan structures in 2018.

The causeways “were efforts that involve a lot of people, a lot of labor and coordination,” Canuto said. “They are complex work projects that would have required coordination and some form of hierarchy.”

LiDAR has been used to detect the remains of early Mayan civilizations since 2015, when two large-scale surveys were taken of the southern half of the Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin. The technology allows for these discoveries to be made without harming the rainforests.

From an airplane flying overhead, light waves are pulsed down, and they bounce off objects below before returning to the sensor. Similar to sonar, which uses sound to locate structures, the LiDAR sensor tracks the amount of time each pulse takes to return and creates a three-dimensional map of the environment below.

“Imagine you’re in Poughkeepsie, (New York), and that’s all you can see, but you might catch this thing that we call the turnpike, right, but everything else is covered in jungle … you’ll have no idea that this turnpike might connect New York with Philadelphia,” Canuto said. “LiDAR is telling us everything that we found archaeologically over the last 100 years, here and there, is found everywhere … LiDAR lets us connect all the dots.”

Researchers are looking to gather more sampling and possibly locate more settlements through LiDAR technology this month to continue their research into the early Mayan civilization, according to Hansen.