Physical Activity and Poor Sleep and Stroke

The research on physical activity’s ability to reduce the risk of various diseases and improve long term health and mortality just continues to explode exponentially. Last week saw two more papers further pushing the important of physical activity (PA).

The first is a paper by Dr. Raed Joundi [1] and colleagues from Canada that found that increased leisure time sedentary activity of more than 8 hours with low PA was associated with an increased risk of stroke in people below the age of 60 years. This means that if you work for 8 hours, sleep for 8 hours and then do nothing but lounge around and are physically inactive for the rest of the 8 hours, you have a higher chance of a stroke, as compared to those who “move”.

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The second paper with a very interesting and important conclusion mines the UK Biobank dataset. Poor sleep is associated with a host of problems, a topic I will tackle on one of the Sundays in the coming weeks. However, this study by Bo-Huei Huang and colleagues [2] found that if you are physically active, even at the lowest level of recommended activity of 600 mets per week (one 60 minutes run per week), you can eliminate the increased cardiovascular and mortality risk that comes from poor sleep. Obviously, those who slept well and were physically active in this study, did the best.

This does not mean that we don’t try and sleep well. Along with sensible eating and managing cardiovascular risk, sleep duration and quality make a difference in our atmasvasth quest to live long, healthy. However, if you have trouble with sleep for whatever reason, then being physically active helps mitigate the long-term health risks associated with poor sleep.

In short, these two papers show us that meeting even the lower limit of PA recommendations of 75 minutes per week (37.5 minutes of brisk walking just twice a week) offsets poor sleep issues while reducing the amount of time spent in physical inactivity decreases the risk of young stroke.

Footnotes

1. Joundi RA, Patten SB, Williams JVA, Smith EE. Association Between Excess Leisure Sedentary Time and Risk of Stroke in Young Individuals. Stroke. 2021 Aug 19:STROKEAHA121034985. doi: 10.1161/STROKEAHA.121.034985. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34407638.

2. Huang BH, Duncan MJ, Cistulli PA et al. Sleep and physical activity in relation to all-cause, cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality risk. Br J Sports Med. 2021 Jun 29:bjsports-2021-104046. doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2021-104046. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34187783.