Health:Sleep, heart disease link leads from brain to marrow/Story: Think,7

Sleep, heart disease link leads from brain to marrow Researchers have known for some time that poor sleep raises heart disease risk. Now, they’ve found a chemical chain reaction that helps explain that risk, leading from poor sleep to a white blood cell surge that promotes the artery-clogging plaques of cardiovascular disease. The world’s top killer, cardiovascular disease kills 17.7 million worldwide annually, according to figures from the World Health Organization. It has been linked to a number of risk factors, including smoking, a poor diet, and lack of exercise. A less widely known risk is chronically poor sleep, whether short or fragmented, like that experienced by night-shift workers, travelers in the grip of jet lag, and sufferers of sleep apnea and similar conditions. “There are studies that suggest [sleep] can be as potent a driver of the disease as more traditional risk factors, such as smoking or high cholesterol levels,” said Cameron McAlpine, a research fellow in the lab of Filip Swirski, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Systems Biology. Four years ago, McAlpine, Swirski, and their colleagues began experiments designed to explore the connection between sleep and the immune and inflammatory mechanisms that play a role in atherosclerosis. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-research-shows-new-link-between-sleep-and-clogged-arteries/?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Chan-Twitter-General&utm_source=Twitter Story: Think, North of Never Land. Chapter 7