Lack Of Sleep May Make You Fat And Diabetic, Study

Do you like to sleep during the weekends in order to make up for lack of sleep the whole week? Then you are sleep deprived, and risk getting obesity and type 2 diabetes, says a study.

Looking at the sleeping habits of 522 revealed that those who lost sleep during the week are more likely to become obese, according to bbc.

The findings were shown at the Endocrine Society's annual meeting, and suggested that more regular sleep can help patients. Experts said that while the findings were interesting, they asked for large trials to test the idea.

Three consecutive nights of sleep deprivation can increase a person's risk to diabetes, raising it to a degree that may lead to a gain of 20 to 30 pounds, going by a 2007 study at the University of Chicago, according to fitnessmagazine.

Looking at the sleeping habits of shift workers, scientists find that such people tend to get into a "pre-diabetic state" due to unregulated sleep hours. When the body clock is thrown out of sync, and the natural rhythm of hormones in the body are disrupted, then a number of health problems could be created.

The study, by a team at the University of Bristol in the UK and Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, probing the sleep habits of people used to having disrupted sleep during the week and trying to catch up in the weekend, are said to have "sleep debt." This tends to give some assessment of the difference in sleep hours during the week, and making up for it during the weekend.

"We found that as little as 30 minutes a day sleep debt can have significant effects on obesity and insulin resistance," said Prof Shahrad Taheri from Weill Cornell. "Sleep loss is widespread in modern society, but only in the last decade have we realised its metabolic consequences.

"Our findings suggest that avoiding 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 experiment was funded by the UK's Department of Health, which devotes 10% of healthcare budgets to treat diabetes.

Diabetes can make people vulnerable to blindness, heart attacks or strokes, damaging nerves and blood vessels and even expose the body to the risk of a foot that needs to be amputated.

BUPA advises that adults should sleep between seven to eight hours a night, teenagers should sleep for nine hours and children should sleep between nine to ten hours.

Dr Denise Robertson, a senior lecturer from the University of Surrey, commented: "This work is interesting and consistent with prospective data found in healthy individuals without type 2 diabetes. However, before this association between sleep length, obesity and metabolic status can be used in terms of public health we need the next tier of evidence."

He added that there has so far been no "randomised controlled trials" in which sleep debt is addressed, trying to get a "metabolic benefit" from it.