Improved
6112 HealthChanged
3786 LivesSaved
3568 Lives1 lives impacted in the last 24 hrs Learn More
How does lack of sleep contribute to heart disease in women? Watch Mellanie True Hills explain the connection by clicking on this story.
Mellanie True Hills:
Well, a lack of sleep can contribute in multiple ways. For one thing, it depresses your immune system and we now know that heart disease can often be not so much from the cholesterol inside your blood vessels, but can be related to inflammation or infection, and not getting enough sleep puts your body and your immune system at risk.
Getting enough sleep helps your body repair itself and helps make you less vulnerable. So that’s one of the ways; another impact is that sleep apnea, a lot of people have maybe heard of it but don’t really know what it is. Sleep apnea is where you don’t sleep soundly and it’s where you stop breathing during the middle of the night and you startle yourself awake and restart your breathing.
But what that does is it deprives the body of oxygen, and sleep apnea has recently been correlated with atrial fibrillation which is another heart disease risk factor. So in fact atrial fibrillation, sleep apnea, and heart disease, all go hand-in-hand. When you have one, you may be more at risk for the other.
So if you’re having sleep apnea, you may be sleep deprived not because you’re not getting enough time in bed trying to sleep but because you’re not sleeping soundly. So that may be an issue as well. So getting sound sleep is extremely important to having a good, healthy heart.
Bio:
Heart Survivor, Author, and Speaker Mellanie is a heart survivor and the author of A Woman's Guide to Saving Her Own Life: The HEART Program for Health & Longevity. After having a brush with death in emergency heart surgery, Mellanie now uses her second chance to coach individuals in creating healthy lifestyles and organizations in creating healthy, productive workplaces.
Heart disease is the #1 killer, and stroke is #3. In the US each day, we lose nearly 3,000 men and women to heart disease and stroke. Forty per cent of us will get, and die from, heart disease or stroke. But it is preventable, if you know what to do.
Women have different heart symptoms than men, and they're typically very subtle, so for women, the first symptom is frequently a heart attack. Knowing those symptoms can save your life.
Mellanie's mission is to spread awareness of how to save your own life. She provides a message of hope and encouragement, sharing how to take control, decrease stress, and protect against heart disease. Audiences consistently say, You changed my life.
To further this mission, Mellanie is the founder and CEO of the American Foundation for Women's Health.
Mellanie also works with organizations that want healthy, productive workplaces to decrease stress and keep employees healthy, including how to leverage technology and culture in doing so.
View Mellanie True Hills' Videos:
https://www.empowher.com/heart
Visit Mellanie True Hills on her Web sites:
www.mellaniehills.com
www.stopafib.org