5 Health Conditions Linked to Poor Sleep

2. Congestive heart failure

While heart problems seem distinct from breathing (and therefore sleeping) problems, the cardiovascular and pulmonary systems are intricately linked.

That’s why, in broad terms, upwards of two-thirds of people with heart failure (when damage to your heart prevents it from pumping enough blood effectively) also have sleep apnea, says James Rowley, M.D., a pulmonologist and the program director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship at RUSH University Medical Center.

Often these patients have central sleep apnea, when the brain fails to tell the lungs to breathe, rather than obstructive sleep apnea, the more widely known type in which a mechanical issue in the throat blocks air from reaching the lungs.

As a result, your sleep is erratic, which puts more stress on the heart, which exacerbates both conditions. “If you don’t treat the sleep apnea, [patients] are not gonna feel better — even if you’ve been treating the congestive heart failure,” says Rowley, the immediate past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “And then there’s also evidence that treating the sleep apnea helps the congestive heart failure.”

Managing heart failure can include lifestyle changes like salt reduction and medications like those that help open up the blood vessels.

3. Menopause

Hot flashes and night sweats are stereotypical menopausal symptoms for a reason, with some research showing that as many as 87 percent of midlife women experience them. So it’s no wonder women going through menopause often struggle to get high-quality sleep.

It’s not just the symptoms of menopause that can interrupt solid shut-eye during this transition — so, too, can stressors like caring for aging parents or menopause-adjacent mental health conditions like depression. And some research suggests about half of menopausal women have an underlying sleep disorder independent of their life stage.

“It can be hard to tease apart, but it is always a discussion to have with your gynecologist, especially one who is very knowledgeable about menopause treatments,” Harris says.

Those treatments may include hormone therapy (which can help reduce hot flashes and night sweats) or nonhormonal meds like benzodiazepines (which can help reduce anxiety). The gold standard, though, is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, Harris says.

“This approach works on limiting naps during the day, creating a more appropriate sleep-wake schedule, working on any thoughts about sleep that might be interfering with the ability to sleep (‘I must sleep or else XYZ will happen tomorrow’) and improving sleep hygiene, movement and light exposure during the day,” she says.

4. Dementia

The term “dementia” encompasses a range of conditions, from mild to severe, Grandner says. “But they all have to do with what’s called neurodegeneration, which means that areas of the brain start losing function and breaking down. And it’s not just the cells themselves dying; it’s also the connections between them that are altered,” he says.

Sleep disturbances frequently accompany that process, with about 25 percent of people with mild to moderate dementia and 50 percent of people with severe dementia facing them, according to the Mayo Clinic.

More specifically, people with Alzheimer’s — the most common type of dementia — may experience “sundowning,” which often starts around dusk but can last into the night. It can include agitation, anxiety, disorientation and pacing throughout the night, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. Dementia’s effect on melatonin production can also disrupt a person’s internal body clock and make it difficult to sleep.

“I don’t think there are any neurodegenerative disorders that don’t have a significant impact on sleep-wake regulation,” Grandner says.

The reverse is true too: Poor sleep can raise the risk of developing dementia in the first place. One 2023 study looking at 10 years of data from U.S. adults over age 64 found that sleep-initiation insomnia (the type where it’s hard to fall asleep) was associated with a 51 percent increased risk of dementia, and using sleep meds was linked to a 30 percent increased dementia risk.

No matter which comes first — poor sleep or dementia — supporting better sleep can include lifestyle adjustments like maintaining a routine and avoiding daytime napping, as well as treatments like melatonin supplementation and light therapy, the Mayo Clinic says.

5. Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease — a progressive brain disorder that is marked by movement challenges like stiff muscles and tremors in the hands and legs — makes it hard to feel comfortable. So people with it often “don’t sleep well because of the rigidity aspects of the disease,” Rowley says.

But there’s more to it than that. Recent research showed that even among people with early-stage Parkinson’s who aren’t yet impaired by motor issues, 71 percent had at least one type of sleep disturbance, like insomnia or excessive daytime sleepiness, and about half had multiple disturbances. That’s likely related to chemical changes in the brain, Parkinson’s medications and other factors that scientists are still studying, the researchers say.

Here, too, it’s key to address both issues. Just treating the Parkinson’s “doesn’t necessarily mean that the insomnia will improve,” Rowley says. “[Patients] should still see the sleep doctor and have cognitive behavioral therapy or sometimes medication.”

Prioritizing sleep to help prevent disease

If you’re currently disease-free, maximizing your sleep quality can help you stay that way, a new study in the journal Nature Medicine shows.

To see how sleep quality and duration affected people’s likelihood of developing all sorts of conditions, researchers looked at data from nearly 7,000 adults who wore activity and sleep trackers over the course of a median of four and a half years. They then squared that data with the participants’ electronic medical records.

Unlike most sleep studies, which either analyze one night of an individual’s sleep or review a population’s sleep as it relates to a particular disease, this one looked “across the entire spectrum of human diseases that show up in people’s electronic medical records,” says the study’s corresponding author Evan Brittain, M.D., a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “We were able to take a really unbiased view at what associations with sleep were more important.”

The researchers found that the less rapid eye movement (REM) and deep sleep the participants got, the more likely they were to develop atrial fibrillation, or an irregular heart beat. And the more inconsistent their sleep schedule, the greater their odds for obesity, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, depression and generalized anxiety disorder.

One of the takeaways, Brittain says, is that going to bed and getting up at the same time every day seems to be more important than getting the oft-recommended eight hours. In fact, seven hours of sleep was the median — not minimum — number of hours people with good health outcomes got.

“I think that finding is a hopeful thing for patients because it’s hard for me to say, ‘You need to get more REM sleep, you need to get more deep sleep,’ and patients can’t do anything with that information,” Brittain says. “But saying, ‘It’s really helpful if you go to bed and wake up at the same times each night; that’s really important for your health’ — that’s something that’s easily digestible.”