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The likelihood of developing hypertension is inversely related to nightly sleep duration. To further explore that relation, researchers conducted a prospective cohort investigation of blood pressure and self-reported sleep time as part of the Whitehall II Study of British civil servants. Using data from 1997 through 1999 and from 2003 through 2004, the investigators performed cross-sectional (4199 men; 1567 women) and longitudinal (2686 men; 1005 women) analyses. At baseline, the mean age of the women was 56.
During the first of the two study periods, 37% of women who reported ≤5 hours of sleep per night had hypertension compared with less than one quarter of women who reported ≥6 hours of sleep. (No association between sleep duration and hy…