Association of Sleep Duration, Midday Napping with Atrial Fibrillation in Patients with Hypertension

Clin Epidemiol. 2022 Mar 22:14:385-393. doi: 10.2147/CLEP.S351045. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to assess the associations of sleep duration, midday napping and the risk of atrial fibrillation (AF) in patients with hypertension.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study enrolling 11,524 hypertensive participates from the Chinese Hypertension Registry Study. Information on sleep duration and midday napping were obtained by a self-administered questionnaire. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to estimate odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the risk of AF.

Results: Compared with sleeping 6 to ≤8 hours/night, those reporting shorter sleep duration (≤5 hours/night) had a greater risk of AF (OR 1.95; 95% CI 1.28-2.95) in the fully adjusted model, while longer sleep (≥9 hours/night) was not significantly associated with the risk of AF. Compared with nonhabitual nappers, nappers had a higher risk of AF (OR 1.28; 95% CI 1.03-1.60) in the fully adjusted model. Moreover, we observed significant joint effects of sleeping ≤5 hours/night and nap (OR 2.13; 95% CI 1.09-4.14) on the risk of AF after adjusting for confounding factors.

Conclusion: Short sleep duration and midday napping were independently and jointly associated with higher risks of AF in patients with hypertension.

Keywords: atrial fibrillation; hypertension; midday napping; sleep medicine.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Jiangxi Science and Technology Innovation Platform Project (20165BCD41005), Fund project of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University (2016YNQN12034, 2019YNLZ12010, IIT-I-2021-00).