Sleep patterns, genetic susceptibility, and venous thromboembolism: A prospective study of 384,758 UK Biobank participants

PLoS One. 2024 Sep 6;19(9):e0309870. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0309870. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Background: Although healthy sleep patterns have been linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in earlier research, it is unclear how beneficial they are for venous thromboembolism (VTE).

Aim: This research aimed to examine the correlation between sleep patterns, genetic susceptibility, and VTE.

Methods: In the UK Biobank cohort, healthy sleep behaviors were defined as early chronotype, 7-8 hours of sleep each day, no snoring, infrequent insomnia, and infrequent daytime sleepiness. Each of the five criteria was given 1 point, creating a healthy sleep score ranging from 0 to 5. Cox proportional hazards regression models were utilized to examine the associations between genetic susceptibility, healthy sleep score and VTE.

Results: The UK Biobank study included 384,758 participants aged 56.6 ± 8.0 years. After a median of 11.9 years of follow-up, 8,885 (2.3%) participants were diagnosed with VTE. A healthy sleep score inversely affected VTE risk. For participants with a score of 5, the hazard ratio of VTE was 0.813 (95% confidence interval: 0.758-0.873, P<0.001) compared to those with a score ≤2. Early chronotype, sleeping 7-8 hours each day, infrequent insomnia, and infrequent daytime sleepiness were significantly associated with a 7.9%, 8.3%, 5.1%, and 20.7% lower risk of VTE, respectively. In addition, the correlation between sleep pattern and the incidence of VTE was consistent, regardless of genetic susceptibility (P for interaction = 0.366).

Conclusions: Our secondary analysis of a large-scale prospectively gathered registry revealed that individuals with a healthy sleep pattern are significantly correlated with lower risk of developing VTE, irrespective of genetic susceptibility.

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Biological Specimen Banks*
  • Female
  • Genetic Predisposition to Disease*
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Proportional Hazards Models
  • Prospective Studies
  • Risk Factors
  • Sleep* / genetics
  • Sleep* / physiology
  • UK Biobank
  • United Kingdom / epidemiology
  • Venous Thromboembolism* / epidemiology
  • Venous Thromboembolism* / genetics

Grants and funding

This work was supported financially by grants from Sichuan Science and Technology Program (No. 2023YFS0027, 2023YFS0240, 2023YFS0074, 2023NSFSC1652, 2022YFS0279, 2021YFQ0062, 2022JDRC0148), Sichuan Provincial Health Commission (No. ZH2022-101), Sichuan University West China Nursing Discipline Development Special Fund Project (No. HXHL20017, HXHL20046, HXHL21016) the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.