Making matters worse, growth hormone—a great healer of the body—which normally surges at night, is shut off by the state of sleep deprivation. Without growth hormone to replenish the lining of your blood vessels, called the endothelium, they will be slowly shorn and stripped of their integrity. Adding insult to real injury, the hypertensive strain that sleep deprivation places on your vasculature means that you can no longer repair those fracturing vessels effectively. The damaged and weakened state of vascular plumbing throughout your body now becomes systemically more prone to
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