“Poor sleep quality was associated with a significantly higher prevalence of diabetes (OR 1.76, 95% CI 1.14 to 2.71) independent of possible confounders. A sleep duration of ≤6 h increased the risk of diabetes (OR 1.25, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.51, p<0.01) compared with the group that slept 6–8 h.”

Says BMJ Open  Medical journalists.



Lack of sleep and diabetes

Relation of sleep quality and sleep duration to type 2 diabetes

Medical researchers and the analysts states that lack of sleep increases blood sugar levels and is more likely to give you difficulty in managing diabetes.

The prevalence of type 2 diabetes continues to increase and affects an estimated 92.4 million people in China. It has become a major public health problem in the country. Aging, being female, obesity and an unhealthy lifestyle are generally considered to be risk factors for diabetes, but an increasing number of studies have shown that diabetes is associated with sleep quantity and quality. 

A prospective study including 6599 initially healthy, non-diabetic men with a mean±SD age of 44.5±4.0 years suggested that sleep disturbances were associated with diabetes prevalence in middle-aged men after a 14.8-year follow-up. The Sleep Heart Health Study with a sample size of 1486 subjects showed that sleep duration of 6 h or less or 9 h or more was associated with an increased prevalence of diabetes and glucose intolerance, compared with sleep duration of 7–8 h per night, after adjustment for confounders



Experiments and results


Experimental studies have shown that sleep deprivation and disturbed sleep tend to decrease glucose tolerance and compromise insulin sensitivity, which suggests that habitual short sleep duration may lead to insulin resistance by increasing sympathetic nervous system activity, raising evening cortical levels and decreasing cerebral glucose utilization. The increased burden on the pancreas from insulin resistance can compromise beta cell function and lead to type 2 diabetes over time


BMJ continues to state that they have evaluated the distribution of sleep quality and duration in the total population and how it varied by incident of diabetes. Multiple logistic regression analysis was used to assess associations between the three-level sleep difficulty complaints and subjective sleep duration with diabetes by adjustment of age, sex, education categories, smoking, employment status, alcohol consumption, BMI categories and regular exercise. 


The interaction between sleep quality and duration was analyzed by a −2 log likelihood ratio test in logistic regression models. The last logistic regression models included nine dummy variables to represent all nine possible combinations of sleep quality and duration, with good sleep and 6–8 h sleep duration as reference


These studies were then carried out from China to Europe, USA and Japan. They therefore do not represent populations across the globe, particularly those from the Indian subcontinent (where type 2 diabetes is highly prevalent) or Africa. It is also not clear whether the results are applicable to the Chinese population. There is increasing evidence that the epidemiology of type 2 diabetes varies with ethnicity and country cultures.



In conclusion


Fellow readers please make it a habit that you have enough sleep, as your body and its functioning relies on you to rest.


It has been tested and proved that indeed poor sleep quality and short sleep duration are associated with an increased prevalence of diabetes, independently of potential confounders such as age, obesity, family history of diabetes, alcohol consumption, smoking, physical activity and other diseases. 


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