Dr Andrew McHill Discusses Damaging Sleep-Related Blood Pressure Changes

Research is finding that changing blood pressure responses from shift work may be due to increased sympathetic activity and that there is an intricate connection between sleep and inflammation, such that lack of sleep can increase inflammation, noted Andrew McHill, PhD, an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University.

McHill is an author on 5 abstracts presented at SLEEP 2023 that investigate the impact of sleep patterns and circadian variations on blood pressure and overall health outcomes.

Transcript

Can you elaborate on the interplay between sleep disruption and the body's inflammatory response?

So we know that sleep and inflammation are very intricately connected, such to the point where if you have too much inflammation, it makes it harder to get to sleep or to stay asleep, and if you don't get enough sleep, it can actually increase your inflammation. As far as our findings go, we think it more pertains to the sympathetic activity and increased sympathetic activity with shift work and sleep disruption that is probably changing blood pressure responses when working these shifts.

How do these alterations affect hemodynamic changes observed in blood pressure regulation?

We are very interested in this overnight blood pressure dipping patterns. We know that if your blood pressure dips 10% or greater than what it is during the daytime, that's a very healthy phenotype. However, in some individuals, they don't have this overnight dipping, which has been associated with a whole host of adverse cardiovascular outcomes and premature mortality. So we've been really focusing on this 24-hour blood pressure rhythm, and we find that when individuals transition into shift work or have been working shift work for a long time, they begin to lose this ability to dip their blood pressure at night when they're going to sleep. And so this could be related to a whole host of about adverse outcomes down the road.

Can you provide examples of these adverse outcomes?

Premature mortality, any type of cardiovascular event, heart attack, stroke, it's been tightly associated with all of those 4 outcomes.

I think it's a very exciting time to be in the field of sleep and circadian research, as we are really looking into this kind of personalized approach for sleep hygiene and sleep habits, and looking at novel mechanisms, such as sleep regularity, for improving health. And I think that these mechanisms may be more feasible for an individual. It's easier, I think, probably to tell someone to go to bed at the same time than to tell them to get more sleep, which is a very difficult intervention. By telling someone if you can just try as hard as you can to go to sleep at the same time, I think will be a lot more feasible.