A proper sleep is the thing that your arteries may need for avoiding calcification, the results of a new study seem to suggest so.

In their study the researchers from the Chicago Medical Center found that those middle aged people who took an extra hour of slumber every night had lesser odds to develop calcification in arteries.

“It is worth mentioning that the results of our study do not suggest that people should go to sleep prematurely or take sleeping pills,” Diane Lauderdale, the lead author of the study, says.

“It is not known yet what’s the link between proper sleep and arteries calcification and as far as we are not able to find why it is so, we can’t tell whether this link is serious or a casual one.”

The study has been published in the American Medical Association Journal Dec.24 issue.

Lauderdale and team have been studying a group of middle aged people for six years and they have been monitoring the performance of their heart arteries from various angles.

Because of calcification, coronary arteries get hardened that causes heart disease. The researchers found that at beginning of the study, no participant had evident arteries calcification, but after five years nearly 12.3% of the participants were found with it.

After the adjustment of various possible risk factors including race, sex and smoking, the researchers noticed that the risk of developing calcification in the arteries had reduced one third by one hour additional sleep.