Sleep Extension to Improve Sleep Quality of Life and Heart Failure: the Sleep-HF Pilot Study

Authors

Syed Imran Ahmed, Virginia Commonwealth University

Original Publication Date

2024

Document Type

Presentation

Comments

10th Annual VCU 3MT® Competition, held on October 4, 2024.

Abstract

Heart failure affects over 6.7 million Americans, many of whom also struggle with poor sleep, leading to reduced quality of life and chronic inflammation. The Sleep-HF Pilot Study explores whether combining sleep coaching and sleep hygiene training can improve sleep quality, reduce inflammation, and enhance overall well-being in patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.

Transcription

So, first up, we have Syed Imran Ahmed in his study, Sleep Extension to Improve Sleep Quality of Life and Heart Failure, the Sleep-HF Pilot Study. He's in the College of Humanities and Sciences, and his advisor is Dr. Salvatore Carbone. Thank you, everyone, for allowing me to present at the first. So I need your help. Please raise your hand if you haven't slept at least seven hours in last one week. Just raise your hand. I can see many of your hands are risen. Don't feel alone. One third of American population is suffering the same problem. Lack of sleep or lack of quality of sleep. What happens when you sleep less? When you sleep less, the next day you are tired. You are sleepy. And you cannot perform at the level you're supposed to perform. At the same time, you're also suffering from a constant low-grade inflammation. Remember that, constant low-grade inflammation. I'll come back to that point. As a sleep researcher, my responsibility is to work with you, right? You guys, to correct your sleep. But unfortunately, this is not my priority at this moment. My priority is to work with those patients who have heart failure. Heart is a machine that collects the blood throughout the body and pumps out throughout the body. So when it fails to do that, we call it heart failure. Depending on the physiology and the amount of the blood is pumping out, there is a ratio. We call it ejection fraction. We classify this heart failure in four different types. But in broad, there are two main, heart failure with reduced rejection fraction, when the rejection fraction goes down really bad, or another one when the rejection fraction is in the middle, around 50% or more. And currently, in the U.S., 6.7 million people are suffering from heart failure. And the majority of them goes to the second class, heart failure with preserved rejection fraction, or HEP-FEB. In my study, I'm focusing on the HEP-FEB patient because we know that from our previous studies that heart failure and sleep are interconnected. Whether you are sleeping poor and eventually develop heart failure or you already develop a heart failure and you're sleeping poorly. And when you have heart failure, one of the physiological causes, pathological causes, is constant low-grade inflammation. So in our study, what we are planning to do to improve their sleep status. Why you do that? Because in a previous study, in the slide on the right side, you can see we saw that people who have poor sleep quality, also their quality of life degraded. It's the study done in only the half per patient. When the sleep quality improves, also their quality of life improves, goes down, goes upward. So what we thought, why don't we work and improve the sleep quality of those patients to give them a better quality of life? So this is why we designed a pilot intervention trial where we interconnected two already proven intervention individually sleep coaching and sleep hygiene training. You can see in the bottom right corner, sleep hygiene training will give this intervention to those people with an aim to improve their quality of life and reduce their inflammation and cardiovascular performance. Thank you.

Rights

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