Just three sleepless nights could be enough to strain your heart
Annie Curtis Wednesday 28 May 2025 11:19 BST
Scientists pinpoint how many hours sleep will increase your risk of heart disease
A new study from Uppsala University in Sweden reveals that just three nights of restricted sleep (around four hours) can trigger changes in the blood that are linked to a higher risk of heart disease.
Researchers found that sleep deprivation caused a rise in inflammatory markers in the blood, which can damage blood vessels and raise the risk of heart failure, coronary heart disease, and irregular heartbeat.
The study involved 16 healthy young men who underwent periods of normal sleep (8.5 hours) and sleep restriction (4.25 hours) in a controlled lab setting.
Exercise-induced boosts in healthy proteins like interleukin-6 and BDNF were weaker after poor sleep, indicating that sleep deprivation can diminish the cardiovascular benefits of physical activity.
The study showed that even short-term sleep deprivation can have significant negative impacts on cardiovascular health. In full
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Daily Mail
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- Daily Mail
Ulrika Jonsson stuns in yellow lace bra as she celebrates her 58th birthday after marking one year sober
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Times
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‘Applying for a pension was a pain so I invented a better way'
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It is partnering with 25 pension and health insurers — Mackey calls them carriers — across Europe, Canada, South Africa and India, and recently added its first insurer in Germany. Carriers include the South African-owned Vitality, the German multinational Allianz and the Spanish health insurer Sanitas. 'When we started it was taking a quarter [three months] to integrate a carrier,' he says. 'Our goal now is to add a [new] carrier every two weeks.' A number of global HR tech companies such as and HiBob are also embedding Kota technology into their platforms, accelerating the proliferation of the Irish company's technology and its revenues. Kota is not yet four years old. 'I have been in a start-up where you are working a lot of late nights, continuously pushing the boulder up the hill,' Mackey says. There are a lot of late nights at Kota, he adds, yet 'chasing the boulder down the hill is a lot more fun'. It's easy to see what's attracting venture capitalists. Making benefits easy for SMEs, increasing pension and health coverage, the company is addressing a huge market. When Mackey pulls the Kota app up on his smartphone, he can check his pension and increase his salary contribution. He examines his health insurance policy to see if he is covered for a forthcoming sinus operation. It's frictionless, à la Revolut. It integrates easily into the client company's payroll and HR system, à la Stripe. Is Kota the Revolut or Stripe of benefits? 'It depends on who we are talking to, HR or IT department,' he says. The company is also leaning into a sizeable opportunity in its home market. The government's auto-enrolment or mandatory pension regime, where every employee in the country must be offered a pension, is due to come into force from January. The state scheme MyFutureFund, which includes a top-up from the government, has its limitations so Kota is mounting a national roadshow to pitch its alternative, which it says is a quick, easy and cost-effective means of becoming auto-enrolment compliant. It is piggy-backing on a state initiative to increase awareness of pensions, to lift its profile through 20 breakfast and lunch meetings. Clever. Kota staffers pulled a late night last week stuffing envelopes with handwritten invitations with a QR code for registration. Mackey, a marketing graduate, was tickled by the idea of a digital-first tech company using 'snail mail' as opposed to an email shot. Auto-enrolment is 'another tailwind', he says. Mackey, a Dubliner, started his first business career when studying for his marketing degree at the National College of Ireland (NCI). With a school friend from CBC Monkstown he set up Spacefox Studios, which made marketing videos and built websites for restaurants and coffee shops. His office was a 'wherever I popped myself down', which was usually a coffee shop. He spent a lot of time watching queues, and customer frustration, building at peak periods. When he graduated from NCI in 2016, Mackey hooked up with a college friend, Alan Haverty, to create Bamboo, a mobile ordering app that made it easier for customers to pick up orders from restaurants close to their place of work at peak times. Within three years the company partnered with 100 restaurants in Dublin, Cork and Galway. • Ireland's 100 best restaurants for 2025 Funding the venture was 'painful', Mackey says. It raised cash from a small number of private individuals and Enterprise Ireland, who invested €225,000. Joe Elias, the US investor who invented vodka 'baggies', or spirits in a pouch, and sold the Irish company Retail inMotion to Lufthansa, also lent the company €200,000. In early 2019, an Australian company showed an interest in acquiring Bamboo as a launchpad into the European market. As talks went on, Bamboo continued to spend on its development. When the Australian suitor walked out, Elias moved to inject more funds and take control. Mackey left in early 2020, just months before the pandemic would crater the business. He needed a job — 'I had no savings' — and applied for the role of Ireland manager for Bolt, the mobility app. At 26 he was Bolt's first Irish employee as it looked to challenge the incumbent MyTaxi, which has become FreeNow. 'My job was to open up and grow the market,' he says. 'So that was everything from getting the licences to operate, hiring the core team, finding an office that our drivers could go to, marketing [Bolt] to drivers to get supply, and marketing it with the passengers to get demand. And doing that in a really short period of time.' It was, he says, one of Bolt's most successful launches. One of his tasks was to put a benefits package in place for employees, which then numbered just five. 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Kota secured approval to act as an insurance intermediate from the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK and the Central Bank of Ireland, which allowed the company to passport its service into Europe. Mackey never saw himself as an insurance intermediary. 'When you are a broker, it means you can talk to insurance companies,' he says. 'And when you talk to insurance companies, we can show them what the product looks like.' His experiences at Bolt taught him about keeping costs down and building at pace. Under the Kota model, insurers get access to distribution free of charge, while companies pay just €9 a month per employee, considerably lower than broker fees. Kota does not offer advice, but it does offer support. 'We talk through options,' he says. There are no commissions, no contracts, and the HR department is not shuffling mounds of forms and paperwork. Its clients are fast-growing, like Kota itself, which is hurtling towards 50 employees. The roll call includes Tines, arguably Ireland's hottest start-up, Belfast's Cloudsmith and the UK online car marketplace Carwow. It's a natural fit for rising tech stars, and while Kota revenues grow naturally from adding new customers, it also benefits from the growth of its existing customer base. The multiplier effect is potentially very powerful. This time around, fundraising has been an awful lot easier. That is partly because Mackey, O'Boyle and Baliga had done a lot of the groundwork before launch, speaking to up to 70 HR and insurance professionals to thoroughly research the opportunity. The investment deck included 20 pages of research with links back to the conversations. 'There was a lot of data,' Mackey says. The plan was to raise €600,000 for the trio to 'kind of hack away at a product for a year or so, and see where it goes', he says. But the pitch got traction. 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Aside from the heavyweight VCs, Kota can count Cocoa, the high-profile London angel investor, and the early-stage funders Plug and Play and 9 Yards, which was founded by George Osborne, the former UK chancellor, as backers, with the Cape Clear founder David Clarke and Alexis Valentin, the former Meta executive, also on board. Mackey says his ambition is to build 'a great Irish technology company' and ultimately take Kota to the stock market. He certainly has the backers to get there. On a sweltering hot August day he can take stock on how far the company has come. 'It feels like it's still January or February because of just how quickly the year has gone by, and how exciting it's been,' he says. 'And that's just how it feels when you're a start-up. It's warp speed, it's high ambition, it's play to win.' Age: 31Lives: DublinMarital status: Single (in a relationship)Education: CBC Monkstown, National College of IrelandFavourite film: Stand by MeFavourite book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz Working: I get up at 7.20am. I start the morning in the coffee shop, on my laptop, usually for an hour, and then get into the office for 9am or 9.30am, and I am there until about 8pm or 9pm. Then home, dinner and I try to get some exercise. I will do a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon too — it's quiet. It sounds a lot but I genuinely love what I do. Downtime: Saturday is for sleeping in and catching up with friends and family. In the winter weeknights, I went out for a sauna with a few other founders — I know, it's very tech bro — but it's just a great way to clear the mind. I run when I can; my girlfriend runs so we run together. I did my first marathon in Copenhagen last year and hope to do a half-marathon before the end of the year. I used to race mountain bikes and it's something I absolutely miss. Sometimes you work hard to get the freedom to go back to things like that.
Telegraph
4 hours ago
- Telegraph
The pioneering therapy that could roll back the rigours of ageing
The clock could be turned back on ageing with a groundbreaking new therapy that aims to recharge cells with 'batteries' from the placenta of newborns. Israel-based Minovia Therapeutics is the first company in the world to start testing mitochondrial transplantation in humans, which could treat incurable diseases and keep bodies younger for longer. Mitochondria are tiny compartments within cells that act like batteries, supplying the cell with the energy it needs to function. In ageing and certain diseases, the mitochondria stop working efficiently, starving the cells of energy, similar to the batteries running down in a machine. But scientists have now shown that it is possible to 'augment' cells with supercharged mitochondria from the placenta. Minovia has already completed clinical trials of the new therapy for patients with Pearson's Syndrome - a mitochondrial disease - and is planning to trial the treatment in elderly people next year. Dr Natalie Yivgi-Ohana, CEO and co-founder of Minovia, said: 'It's actually a very natural process for cells to take up mitochondria when they come in contact with them, but it was usually only one in 1000 cells that would do it. 'In the past 13 years, we've developed a method to maximise cellular take up without harming the cells or the mitochondria, so now more than 50 per cent of cells take up a significant amount of mitochondria. 'We take it from the youngest and healthiest organ, which is the placenta and which is full of super mitochondria and yet it's normally thrown away like garbage. We could find it to be the fountain of youth.' To make the therapy, scientists take the mitochondria from a healthy donated placenta and mix them with blood stem cells, which are then infused back into the patient's bloodstream. Not only do the super mitochondria help to produce more energy in cells, but they also reactivate natural quality control functions inside cells, which keep failing mitochondria at bay. So over time, the level of the body's healthy mitochondria also goes up. Last month, the company released phase 2 results for Pearson Syndrome, which can cause a range of problems in children, including failure to thrive, diabetes and neurological issues. There are currently no approved therapies for the condition, and care is only palliative, with patients dying during childhood. But the new therapy has led to marked improvements. 'Severe energy failure' 'These were all paediatric patients and they suffer severe energy failure, so they are not growing,' added Dr Yivgi-Ohana. 'It took a few months, but we have started observing improvement in their energy and less fatigue, more waking hours. We observed improvement in renal function, improvement in appetite, in growth.' Now the company is turning its attention towards ageing, and is hoping that growing older may one day be seen as a treatable disease. The company is planning to start trials of the treatment for elderly people in Israel next year and is developing biomarkers so they can test whether older people are experiencing mitochondrial dysfunction. It could even help diseases of ageing, such as Parkinson's, which is strongly linked to mitochondrial dysfunction. 'Significant in almost every disease' 'We are all going to suffer mitochondrial disease as we age,' added Dr Yivgi-Ohana. 'Ageing is not considered a disease, but if we have a way to demonstrate that actually, as we age, we become mitochondrially dysfunctional, then that would be the trigger to propose a treatment. 'We want to start next year treating elderly people with mitochondrial dysfunction in longevity clinics and demonstrate that it really helps. ' She added: 'The scalability in terms of the mitochondria is unlimited, there are no limitations of placentas and the amount of mitochondria that we can harvest and cryopreserve.' 'Mitochondria are such powerful organelles, and they can transfer between cells, so their sensing and their information transfer is so significant in almost every disease that you will look at.'
