Past research has suggested that sleeping late over the weekend can't make up for the sleep you may have lost during the week (i.e., your "sleep debt"), but a new study out of China puts forth at least one possible benefit of that extra shut-eye, which it refers to as "compensated sleep." For their research set to be presented Sunday by the European Society of Cardiology, scientists pulled data from more than 90,000 subjects who took part in the UK Biobank project, which contains genetic and medical info. Just over one-fifth of them were considered to be sleep deprived—meaning they got less than the recommended minimum of seven hours per night.
The subjects were split into four groups based on how much extra sleep they were able to get on the weekends, and the researchers, using hospital files and cause-of-death registry info, then followed up with all of the patients over a median span of 14 years to see how they'd fared in terms of heart disease. The scientists found that the quadrant that experienced the most compensated sleep—from just over an hour to 16 hours extra—were 19% less likely to develop cardiovascular disease than the group that got even less sleep than they did during the workweek.
NBC News notes some caveats with the study, including that it can't yet be proven that the extra sleep is directly responsible for the lower risk of heart disease. And Dr. Muhammad Adeel of Indiana University's School of Medicine, who wasn't involved in the study, says that such compensatory sleep may only alleviate part of the sleep debt problem. "For example, sleeping longer over the weekend may reduce fatigue and sleepiness; however, [it] may not reduce the risk of obesity in people who are [sleep] deprived," he notes. Healthnews suggests ways to get better sleep during the week instead, such as not drinking booze or caffeine before bed, trying to stick to a consistent bedtime, and not bringing one's phone into bed. (More discoveries stories.)
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