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 Researchers conducted a sleep experiment with 19 healthy young men
and found just four nights of sleep deprivation were linked to
changes in their blood suggesting their bodies weren’t handling
sugar as well as usual.
But then, when they let the men get extra sleep for the next two
nights, their blood tests returned to normal, countering the effect
of the short-term sleep deprivation.
“It gives us some hope that if there is no way to extend sleep
during the week, people should try very hard to protect their sleep
when they do get an opportunity to sleep in and sleep as much as
possible to pay back the sleep debt,” said lead study author Josaine
Broussard of the University of Colorado Boulder.
The study doesn’t prove sleeping late every weekend can counter the
ill effects of insufficient rest every other night of the week,
Broussard cautioned.
And it doesn’t prove that catching up on sleep will prevent
diabetes.
“We don’t know if people can recover if the behavior is repeated
every week,” Broussard added by email. “It is likely though that if
any group of people suffer from sleep loss, getting extra sleep will
be beneficial.”
To assess the impact of sleep on diabetes risk, Broussard and
colleagues focused on what’s known as insulin sensitivity, or the
body’s ability to use the hormone insulin to regulate blood sugar.
Impaired insulin sensitivity is one risk factor for type 2 diabetes,
which is associated with age and obesity and happens when the body
can't properly convert blood sugar into energy.
The researchers did two brief sleep experiments. On one occasion,
the volunteers were permitted just 4.5 hours of rest for four
nights, followed by two evenings of extended sleep that amounted to
9.7 hours on average. On another occasion, the same men were allowed
to sleep 8.5 hours for four nights.
After the four nights of sleep deprivation, the volunteers’ insulin
sensitivity had fallen by 23 percent and their bodies had started to
produce extra insulin. But when researchers checked again after two
nights of extended rest, the men’s insulin sensitivity, and the
amount of insulin their bodies produced, had returned to normal,
mirroring what was seen during the portion of the experiment when
the volunteers consistently got a good nights’ rest.
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The volunteers were given a calorie-controlled diet to limit the
potential for their food and drink choices to influence the
outcomes. In the real world, when people don’t get enough sleep they
tend to overeat, which may limit how much results from this lab
experiment might happen in reality, the authors note in a report
scheduled for publication in the journal Diabetes Care.
“The results from the present study are unlikely to be fully
reflective of what may occur in persons who are older, overweight or
obese, or have other potent risk factors for diabetes,” said James
Gangwisch, a researcher at Columbia University who wasn’t involved
in the study.
Chronically sleep-deprived people are more likely to develop other
health problems, though, ranging from obesity to high blood pressure
to cognitive deficits, the study authors point out.
“By catching up on sleep on the weekends, people are reducing
average extent and severity of the effects of sleep deprivation,”
Gangwisch added by email. “Ideally, we would all get sufficient
sleep on a nightly basis.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1DDtd9j Diabetes Care, released January 18,
2016.
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