Response to Poor Sleep With Normal Sleep Duration: A Preventive Effect on Incident Hypertension

We thank Dr Kawada1 for his comments on our recent article published in Hypertension 2. Dr Kawada1 points out that in previous studies long sleep duration has been associated with cardiovascular risk, whereas in our study poor sleepers with normal sleep duration were somewhat protected from developing hypertension.2 However, these studies differ substantially both in terms of methods and definitions used. In our study, sleep duration was measured objectively, and all subjects were recorded with polysomnography for a fixed time period of 8 hours. The reference group in our study consisted of those individuals without sleep complaints who slept ≥6 hours.2 In contrast, the studies cited by Dr Kawada1 measured habitual sleep duration with …