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Having ample amount of sleep at night is not only important to start a fresh morning; it also has many a health benefits in the long run.

According to a new study, lack of sleep could give rise to more aggressive breast cancers. However, the study findings are true only for psot-menopausal women.

The study, led by Cheryl Thompson, PhD, is the first ever to associate insufficient sleep and biologically more aggressive tumors and chances of cancer recurrence.

For the study, the researchers analyzed medical records and survey responses of 412 post-menopausal breast cancer patients treated at UH Case Medical Center with Oncotype DX, a widely utilized test to guide treatment in early stage breast cancer by predicting likelihood of recurrence, Medical Xpress reported.

The selection of the patients was done at diagnosis and they were quizzed on their sleeping habits on an average and the time duration for which they slept in the last two years.

It was found that women slept for six hours or less per night on an average before being diagnosed with breast cancer had higher Oncotype DX tumor recurrence scores. The Oncotype DX test assigns a tumor a recurrence score based on the expression level of a combination of 21 genes, the report said.

"This is the first study to suggest that women who routinely sleep fewer hours may develop more aggressive breast cancers compared with women who sleep longer hours," said Dr. Thompson, who is Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and lead author, according to Medical Xpress.

"We found a strong correlation between fewer hours of sleep per night and worse recurrence scores, specifically in post-menopausal breast cancer patients. This suggests that lack of sufficient sleep may cause more aggressive tumors, but more research will need to be done to verify this finding and understand the causes of this association."

The authors point out that this correlation between sleep duration and recurrence of cancer, though is strong in post-menopausal women, it is not true for pre-menopausal women.

"Short sleep duration is a public health hazard leading not only to obesity, diabetes and heart disease, but also cancer," said Li Li, MD, PhD, a study co-author and family medicine physician in the Department of Family Medicine at UH Case Medical Center and Associate Professor of Family Medicine, Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. "Effective intervention to increase duration of sleep and improve quality of sleep could be an under-appreciated avenue for reducing the risk of developing more aggressive breast cancers and recurrence."

The findings are published in the August issue of Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.