A new study shows that poor or inadequate sleep can aggravate heart problems in women by raising their inflammation levels.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco conducted a study wherein they found that poor or inadequate sleep in women tends to aggravate heart problems in women by raising their inflammation levels. However, this doesn't hold true for men.

"Inflammation is a well-known predictor of cardiovascular health," lead author Aric Prather, a clinical health psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a university news release. "Now we have evidence that poor sleep appears to play a bigger role than we had previously thought in driving long-term increases in inflammation levels and may contribute to the negative consequences often associated with poor sleep," Prather added.

This study strongly reconfirms the findings of previous studies that state less than 6 hours of sleep per night can lead to chronic health problems including heart disease, and is associated with higher levels of inflammation.

For the study, researchers looked at 700 men (average age of 66) and women (average age of 64) with coronary heart disease for five years. At the beginning and end of the study all participants were asked to rate the quality of sleep they got each month. Their options were "very good," "fairly good," "good," "fairly bad," or "very bad."

At the end of five years, researchers found that women who reported poor quality sleep also showed a rise in their inflammation levels 2.8 times more than women who had better quality sleep. However, this was not the case for men. Most of the women in the study were postmenopausal and their lower levels of estrogen could help explain the link between poor sleep and higher levels of inflammation, the study authors suggested.

"It is possible that testosterone, which is at higher levels in men, served to buffer the effects of poor subjective sleep quality," Prather's team wrote in the study published online June 5 in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

However, researchers of the study did clarify that though a connection between self reported poor sleep and rise in inflammation levels in women was found, this doesn't determine a "cause and effect" relationship between the two.