Only three nights of bad sleep increases heart attack and stroke danger
Three nights of poor sleep can raise the risk of a heart attack or stroke in "perfectly healthy" people.
A new study has revealed that a lack of shuteye triggers molecular mechanisms that are linked to a greater danger of heart problems and just a couple of nights of inadequate rest is enough to set them off.
Swedish experts investigated how sleep deprivation affects biomarkers (proteins in this case) in the body that are linked to cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Jonathan Cedernaes, study leader at Uppsala University, said: "Unfortunately, nearly half of all Swedes regularly experience disturbed sleep, and this is particularly common among shift workers.
"That is why we wanted to try to identify mechanisms that affect how lack of sleep can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.
"Ultimately, the purpose was to identify opportunities to address these problems."
The research team studied 16 young men of normal weight and with healthy sleep patterns - strictly controlling the amount of rest they got and making them do high-intensity 30-minute workouts.
The boffins found increased signs of inflammation in the blood of participants when they were sleep-deprived, regardless of their healthy status.
They wrote in the journal Biomarker Research: "Our findings based on highly standardised in-lab conditions, indicate that even short-term sleep restriction can produce a biomarker profile associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk."
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Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month. It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March. Another US company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the moon's south pole and was declared dead within hours. Resilience is targeting the top of the moon, a less forbidding place than the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side's northern tier. Once settled with power and communication flowing, the 2.3-metre Resilience will lower the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface. Made of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace's European-built rover — named Tenacious — sports a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for NASA. It also holds a tiny, Swedish-style red cottage with white trim and a green door, dubbed the Moonhouse by creator Mikael Genberg, for placement on the lunar surface. Takeshi Hakamada, CEO and founder of ispace, considers the latest moonshot "merely a steppingstone," with its next, much bigger lander launching by 2027 with NASA involvement, and even more to follow. Two other US companies are aiming for moon landings by year's end: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Astrobotic Technology. Astrobotic's first lunar lander missed the moon altogether in 2024 and came crashing back through Earth's atmosphere. For decades, governments competed to get to the moon. Only five countries have pulled off successful robotic lunar landings: Russia, the US, China, India and Japan. 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Resilience holds a rover with a shovel to gather lunar dirt as well as a Swedish artist's toy-size red house that will be lowered onto the moon's dusty surface. Long the province of governments, the moon became a target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than wins along the way. Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month. It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March. Another US company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the moon's south pole and was declared dead within hours. Resilience is targeting the top of the moon, a less forbidding place than the shadowy bottom. 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