Day Light Savings Ruins Sleep and Trigger Heart Attacks, Scientists

This Sunday, clocks will be wound forward one hour in the U.S. in accordance with day light savings time. This means for all U.S. citizens, excluding those that lives in states that don't observe the tradition --looking at you, Arizona and Hawaii -- our body clocks will have to adjust once more.

But according to past research, this also means that for at least the first few days, U.S. citizens will be facing an increased risk of body pain, heart attack, and even stroke, depending on their age and body size.

Numerous sleep experts have argued for years that pushing the clock forward one hour actually results in a briefly disrupted sleep cycle for many Americans. Dr. Steven Feinsilver, the director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York said in a university release that suddenly waking up an hour earlier every day could disrupt a person's sleep cycle for at least a week.

And a disrupted sleep cycle means restless sleep.

A great host of studies have been dedicated to the adverse effect that restless sleep has on a person's body. Studies just this year have linked restless sleep in adults to major body pain, while restless sleep in obese adolescents has been found to be linked to stroke, heart attack, and even the development of type two diabetes.

However, even short-term sleep disruption is tied to heart complications. Research published last year in the American Journal of Cardiology showed evidence of a small increase in heart attack risk among U.S. residents on the first day of the spring transition. Another study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2008 argued that heart attack rates slightly rise the first week of daylight savings time, and drop slightly the week following its end.

So what does this mean for us? Simple. The night before the clock get turned back an hour, you should go to bed earlier. This won't exactly stop anyone's sleep cycle from being disrupted -- in-fact, experts argue that it will likely prove very hard to fall asleep at an earlier time -- but it will ensure that you at least are trying to get the full amount of sleep your body is used to getting.

Incidence of Myocardial Infaction With Shifts to and From Daylight Saving Time was published in the American Journal of Cardiology on March 1, 2013.

Shifts to and From Daylight Saving Time and Incidence of Myocardial Infarction was published in The New England Journal of Medicine on October 30, 2008.