A recent study suggests that individuals who try to compensate their weekday sleep loss and make up for it by oversleeping in the weekend are risking their metabolic disruption which could encourage the influx of Type 2 diabetes.
Lead study author Shahrad Taheri, professor of medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Doha, said “While previous studies have shown that short sleep duration is associated with obesity and diabetes, we found that as little as 30 minutes a day sleep debt can have significant effects on obesity and insulin resistance at follow up.”
“This reinforces earlier observations that sleep loss is additive and can have metabolic consequences,” Taheri noted.
The research team assembled 522 patients with recent diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes mellitus in the Early Activity in Diabetes trial. They have put these patients in 3 random groups: usual care, physical activity intervention, or diet and physical activity intervention. The participants had to complete their 7 day sleep diaries and had to calculate their weekday over-sleeping as their contribution to the research.
The first level of the research consisted of comparing with participants who did not have a weekday sleep debt. The ones who did have weekday sleep debt had 72% higher probability of being obese and after 6 months of the initiation of the research, it was found that weekday sleep debt was very closely intertwined with obesity and insulin resistance. One year down the line of the research, it was found that for every 30 minutes of weekday sleep debt, the danger of obesity and resistance to insulin drastically elevated by 17% to 39% correspondingly.
Taheri further added, “Sleep loss is widespread in modern society, but only in the last decade have we realized its metabolic consequences. Our findings suggest that avoid sleep debt could have positive benefits for waistlines and metabolism and that incorporating sleep into lifestyle interventions for weight loss and diabetes might improve their success.”
The research outcomes were presented at the ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego.
