Diabetes risk linked to how much sleep you're getting

Getting adequate and good sleep is important for your health, including in helping to prevent diabetes. — dpa

Too much sleep, too little sleep, or sleep where you toss and turn, and spend half the night staring goggle-eyed at the ceiling: All of these make you more likely to develop diabetes.

That’s going by an examination of 14 years’ worth of patient data by South Korean doctors, which led them to say that getting less than six hours’ shut-eye, or more than 10, both appear to increase the likelihood of diabetes.

The researchers collected data from 8,816 participants in the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study.

During the almost decade-and-a-half follow-up period, 18% of the participants were diagnosed with diabetes.

“Most previous studies did not examine changes in various glycometabolic parameters over 14 years.

"The pattern of changes in various glycaemic parameters may provide clues to the mechanism underlying the association between sleep duration and incident diabetes mellitus,” said CHA University School of Medicine Associate Professor Dr Kim Wonjin, who also practises at the CHA Gangnam Medical Center in Seoul.

He and his colleagues presented their findings at Endo 2023, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago, United States, in mid-June (2023).

The link between sleep and diabetes has long been known to the medical profession.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warns that “if you get less than seven hours of sleep per night regularly, your diabetes will be harder to manage” as it can “increase insulin resistance” and “make you hungrier the next day and reduce how full you feel after eating”.

But this new research suggests that the risk could also be linked to sleeping more than 10 hours a day.

Other recent research has suggested that sleep apnoea – a condition that causes people to wake dozens of times a night due to lack of oxygen – can worsen health problems, including diabetes, in later life. – dpa