Boston (SmartAboutHealth) - A new study has found that sleep deprivation combined with hypertension greatly increases the risk of heart disease.

It is currently recommended that adults get at least 7 hours of sleep each night. Kids aged 5 to 12 are supposed to get 9 to 11 hours each night, while adolescents need around 9.

The study was led by Dr. Kazuo Eguchi of the Jichi Medical University in Japan and focused on a total of 1,255 men and women with hypertension.

The average age of the volunteers, who were followed for 50 months, was 70-years old.

Researchers monitored them to check how much they slept, blood pressure, etc.

What they found was that over that period, there were 99 cardiac event such as heart attacks, strokes, etc.

They found that those who slept less than 7.5 hours each night had a cardiac event rate of 2.4 per 100 person-years.

This was much higher than those who got the average amount of sleep each night of around 7 to 8 hours, as their rate was at 1.8 per 100 person-years.

Those who had both sleep deprivation and high blood pressure were four times more likely to have heart disease.

The study is published in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine.