Though aided by genetics, you normally have to something actively to create calcified, narrowed heart arteries.   Tobacco is a powerful promoting influence, but eating lots of cheeses and meats full of saturated fats plus the high fructose corn syrup and industrial starches that are the bedrock of the American diet provide the common, recognized ways to harden your arteries.

         Yet now you can calcify your arteries simply and easily, without major effort Š just stay up at night.

         A recent University of Chicago follow up study of cardiovascular risk did things differently.  Healthy 35-47 year olds were checked for five years with serial CAT scans of their heart arteries.  They also had their sleep monitored.

         Sleep was studied not by standard diaries, but by actigraphy. Actigraphs look like wristwatches, but measure how your body moves throughout the day. The relative quietness of sleep lets you check quite accurately how much sleep people actually get.

         Many in the Chicago study slept less than five hours a night.  Whether they were working two jobs or worried about the kids, 27% of this groupÕs heart arteries calcified.  For those who slept more than 7 hours, the calcification rate was 6%. Every extra hour of sleep decreased calcification rates 33%.

Why Does Sleeplessness Affect the Heart?

         The researchers cautiously interpreted their data, noting some factor common to heart disease and sleeplessness might have led to coronary calcification. However, they statistically controlled for intercurrent illnesses like diabetes and hypertension. They posited increased cortisol and blood pressure from not sleeping might explain their results.

         Such explanations miss the major point Š rest is restoration.  To think about the body, you need to think systemically.

         Sleep is a major system of body restoration.  People who donÕt sleep donÕt remember things.  They donÕt learn well.  They look prediabetic.  TheyÕre cranky and slow.  Over time, sleeplessness leads to clinical depression.

         Sleeplessness also hurts immunity.  Recent studies of fruit flies showed their reaction to lethal infection was much more robust asleep than awake (yes, fruit flies do sleep, sort of.)  Changing the circadian rhythm of the flies also impaired their infection fighting abilities.

         If anything, there are too many reasons sleeplessness produced arterial calcification in healthy, young Chicagoans. Lack of sleep could have increased inflammation, a well known cause of coronary narrowing and poor arterial function.  Sleeplessness might also have produced temporary glucose increases without creating frank diabetes, as occurs in sleep deprivation studies. Blood pressure highs and lows might have aggravated. Sleepless people are also crankier and more anxious, leading to more stress at work and home.

         Bad things happen when you neglect one of the major ways to restore your body, brain, and spirit.

Take Home Lessons

         Research deals best with variables that can be controlled.  ItÕs easier studying genetically identical peas than working, sleeping people. 

         However, much of human life is organized in systems. Economically we see how interconnected everything is, whether its subprime mortgages in America or pipeline conflicts in Nigeria.  The body is particularly interconnected. Studying one thing at a time may obscure how things fit together.

         Sleep is a major part of rest, the process by which the body restores and rebuilds itself.  People are so used to working with machines that sometimes think of themselves as one, and machines are usually hardworking, inanimate, and unconcerned when or where they are used.

         As long as the electricity works, your Internet connections donÕt care whether it is 4 A.M. or 4 P.M., whether theyÕre hooked up in Narita Airport or a Miami Starbucks, or if theyÕve been operating twelve seconds or twelve hours.

         You do.  The human body is a series of systems built on time.  You donÕt want to labor hard in the field for twenty-two hours, or write a speech at 4 A.M.          

         Nor is activity separate from rest.  If youÕre awake long enough, you need to sleep.  If youÕre exercising, you need to physically rest.  Your body exists in the nexus between energy and information. Everything you do becomes body information, like how much you eat, when, and how.

         In the future weÕll observe increasing health effects from decreased sleep but even more from decreased rest.  

         Even if we did not live at the extremes, rest is required for our survival. In a world out of whack, we will need it more.

Dr. Matthew Edlund practices sleep medicine and psychiatry in Sarasota.  His new book, Designed To Last, is available online. He can be reached at 365-4308 and via his Web site at doctoredlund.com.