My new excuse ..er ..reason

February 12, 2007
NAPPING MAY BE GOOD FOR YOUR HEART

Like to kick back for an afternoon siesta? Good news: a new study shows that regular napping may cut your risk of dying from a heart attack or other heart problems.

In the largest study to date on the effects of midday snoozing, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Athens Medical School in Greece, tracked 23,681 apparently healthy men and women, ages 20 to 86, for more than six years.

Their findings, published in today's Archives of Internal Medicine: those who took afternoon siestas of 30 minutes or more at least three times a week had a 37 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who did not.

Even more impressive: researchers found that working men who took regular or occasional naps had a 64 percent lower risk of death from heart attacks or other heart-related ills than their nonnapping compeers. And working women? "The apparent effect was evident mainly among working men," says lead study author Dimitrios Trichopoulos. "There were not enough coronary deaths among working women (only six) in this group to allow sound inference." (Of course, some might consider that a positive thing.)

Trichopoulos, a cancer prevention and epidemiology professor at HSPH, says researchers decided to look into this issue, because coronary mortality tends to be low in populations in which the prevalence of siestas tends to be high.

"Our working hypothesis has been that napping may have stress-releasing properties," he says.
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