Dhaka, Oct. 21 -- A standard overnight sleep test could double as an early warning system for heart disease, according to new research reported by The Independent.

Scientists have shown that artificial intelligence can extract cardiovascular risk signals from ECG recordings taken during routine sleep studies -- the same tests used to diagnose insomnia and sleep apnoea -- and use them to forecast a patient's likelihood of heart attack, stroke, irregular heart rhythm, heart failure or death up to a decade later.

Researchers trained the AI model on data from more than 15,000 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston before validating it against two further datasets totalling over 22,000 patients from Emory University Hospital in...