Researchers found a link between lack of sleep and heart disease, according to a report published in the latest “Journal of the American Medical Association.”

Earlier studies that referred to the connection between sleeplessness and the risk of getting heart disease were considered somewhat irrelevant, since they were based on participants’ self-reports of their sleep times, which are usually unreliable - for the reason that people tend to overstate the amount of sleep they get nightly.

Diana Lauderdale, an epidemiologist at the University of Chicago, and colleagues looked at nearly 500 middle-aged adults from the U.S., who were equipped with an device called an actigraph. In order to determine volunteers’ underlying heart health, researchers did computerized tomography, scans of their coronary arteries. Volunteers slept about six hours a night. Only few of them got more than eight hours of nightly sleep.

Following five years, investigators found that the risk of participants who got five to seven hours of sleep a night to develop early signs of blood-vessel damage was almost 50 percent higher, compared to those who rested more. And people who regularly sleep less than five hours nightly were at even higher risk.

“Science is once again confirming a commonly held belief — an anecdote of our common knowledge — sleep matters,” affirmed Richard Staudacher, a cardiologist with ProHealth Care Medical Associates Cardiology in Waukesha, Wisconsin.