A new study has found that sleep duration may determine health-related quality of life (HRQOL) experienced by people who suffer from chronic kidney disease. The findings of the study will be published in the upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

For chronic kidney disease patients, lack of energy, fatigue and drowsiness are the commonest symptoms that cause poor health related quality of life. Health related quality of life is a patient’s total perception of mental and physical health.

Scientists from the Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine in Seoul in South Korea set out to determine whether the duration of sleep affects health related quality of life in people with chronic kidney disease. They studied data from 1910 adults who participated in the Korean Cohort Study for Outcome in Patients with CKD. The study was designed to identify risk factors that are linked to CKD and its outcome.

When plotting sleep duration against a number of indicators for health-related quality of life, the researchers found an inverted U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and health-related quality of life. The participants who slept less than 4 hours per day and those who slept more than 9 hours per day had low health-related quality of life. The 7-hour sleepers had the highest health-related quality of life.

“Our findings suggest that short or long sleep duration is independently associated with low HRQOL in adults with CKD. Sleep duration is an important predictor of HRQOL in CKD,” said Dr. Lee, the research team’s spokesperson.

Sleep is only one of the numerous natural methods out there proven to help you improve your chronic kidney disease.