Daylight Saving Time Increases Heart-Attack Risk, Health Experts Find - East Idaho News

Daylight Saving Time Increases Heart-Attack Risk, Health Experts Find

  Published at

Getty H 033011 SleepingMan?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1331482249790Erik Snyder/Photodisc/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Daylight saving time not only affects sleep habits, but it could also have an impact on your heart, according to health experts.

HealthDay reports that heart-attack risk increases after daylight saving time that occurred early Sunday morning.

The Monday and Tuesday after moving the clocks ahead “is associated with a 10 percent increase in the risk of having a heart attack,” Martin Young, an associate professor in the cardiovascular disease division at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said in a university news release. “The opposite is true when falling back in October. This risk decreases by about 10 percent.”

The risk peaks on Monday, when most people wake up an hour earlier for work, Young said.

“Exactly why this happens is not known but there are several theories,” Young said. “Sleep deprivation, the body’s circadian clock and immune responses all can come into play when considering reasons that changing the time by an hour can be detrimental to someone’s health.”

While the recently released study found an association between sleep loss and heart-attack risk, it failed to provide a cause-and-effect relationship.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

SUBMIT A CORRECTION