Moonlight, phone screens and standby LEDs: Is your bedroom too bright?

Light pollution during night sleep — as little as moonlight or light coming through a door gap — takes a toll on human hearts, according to a new study published in the European Heart Journal. “Exposure to higher levels of light at nighttime is linked to cardiac remodelling,” Lu Qi from Tulane University, New Orleans, USA, who led the research, said in a press release. “This is where the structure and function of the heart changes and we typically see it in response to chronic stress or injury to the heart.”While that’s how the human body adapts to that stress, “ultimately it weakens the heart and can lead to heart failure,” he said. Therefore, keeping bedrooms as dark as possible “should be considered as one of the potential strategies for preventing heart disease by clinicians and policy makers,” Qi said.