Sleep and Vascular Health Study

Habitual short sleep duration (\< 7 hours/night) increases the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality. Yet most adults, especially emerging adults (i.e., 18-25 years) do not achieve the National Sleep Foundation recommendation of 7-9 hours of sleep each night. Additionally, the American Heart Association recently included sleep duration in the "Life's Essential 8". This recent development emphasizes the importance of sleep and the need to advance our understanding of how sleep impacts cardiometabolic health (CMH), particularly in emerging adults, a population whose CVD risk trajectory is malleable. Specifically, emerging adulthood is a critical age window when age-related loss of CMH accelerates. Based on my previous work and others, both self-reported and objective measures of poor sleep (e.g., duration, variability) are linked to early signs of elevated CVD risk in emerging adults, such as microvascular dysfunction and elevated central blood pressure (BP), which precede the development of hypertension.