Apples for Health- Too little sleep ups diabetes risk

Too little sleep ups diabetes risk

QUEBEC CITY, April 22 (UPI) -- People who sleep too much or not enough are at greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance, Canadian researchers said.

The findings, published online in the journal Sleep Medicine, found that the risk is 2 1/2 times higher for people who sleep less than seven hours or more than eight hours a night.

Jean-Philippe Chaput, Angelo Tremblay and Jean-Pierre Despres of Universite Laval a colleagues said that analyzed the life habits of 276 subjects over a six-year period. They determined that over this timespan, approximately 20 percent of those with long and short sleep duration developed type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance versus only 7 percent among subjects who were average duration sleepers.

Even after taking into account the effect attributable to differences in body mass among the subjects, the risk of diabetes and insulin resistance was still twice as high among those with longer and shorter sleep duration than average sleepers.

Diabetes is not the only risk associated with sleep duration, a growing number of studies have shed light on a similar relationship between sleep and obesity, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality, the researchers added.