There is a 30% increase in the risk of death if you nap too long?

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Lao Li, who was about to take a nap, was startled by a sudden article pushed to his phone and immediately lost all sleep. The article said a U.S. study found that long daytime naps can greatly increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease. The article said that the U.S. study found that too much time during the day would greatly increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease, and that the old Li thought that since he retired, he had the habit of taking a nap every day and had maintained it for more than a decade.

So Lao Li hurriedly forwarded the news to his close friends, telling them about this astonishing discovery, and in an instant, Lao Li's circle of friends instantly exploded, and everyone went online to search for news about it, and finally determined that there was really such a study. So the nap time is too long, will increase the risk of dementia, this statement is true or false? The first thing you need to do is to take a nap or not.

I. US study: The longer the nap, the higher the risk of Alzheimer's?

"No nap at noon, collapse in the afternoon", napping is a habit almost every Chinese person has, it can relieve the tiredness brought by the morning work, but also keep the afternoon full of energy. However, the "wrong nap" may also have negative effects.

Researchers at the University of California found that there is a "two-way relationship" between Alzheimer's and napping - more frequent, longer naps increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease, and as people with Alzheimer's disease age, they take longer naps.

The study, which included 1,065 subjects with an average age of 81 who wore a device on their wrists to monitor their sleep and were followed for 14 years, found that the average person's nap time increased by an average of 11 minutes per year as they aged; people with mild cognitive impairment napped for an average of 24 minutes per year; and people with Alzheimer's napped for an average of 68 minutes per year! increased by an average of 68 minutes per year!

And influenced by the two-way relationship, napping also works in turn on cognitive function, with findings finding that napping for more than an hour at least once a day is associated with a 40% higher risk of Alzheimer's than people who nap for less than an hour a day.

Not coincidentally, in October 2020, researchers at Guangzhou Medical University published a study in Sleep Medicine that included more than 20 studies involving more than 300,000 subjects in an analysis that explored the relationship between napping and the risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality.

The results found that people who napped for more than one hour had a 34% increased risk of cardiovascular disease and a 30% increased risk of all-cause mortality compared with people who never napped.

Two, the study found: the best nap length is 30 minutes

Since too long a nap can have a negative impact on health, what is the best nap length?

A study published in the European Society of Cardiology Congress on April 13, 2023, and released by the University of Huevar in Spain, found that the optimal length of a nap should be 15-30 minutes.

The study collected nap data from more than 20,000 Spanish university graduates to look at the association between nap length and arrhythmias and atrial flutter, and researchers divided the study into three groups based on nap length: the never-nap group, the less-than-30-minute nap group, and the more-than-30-minute nap group, and found that:

The researchers' explanation for the association between napping and health suggests that short naps may help improve circadian rhythms, reduce stress, and lower blood pressure, while long naps may cause the body's circadian rhythms to be disrupted, leading to less activity and shorter sleep at night.