How Lack of Sleep Can Effect Your Diabetes

Posted in Diabetes Risk Factorsby Max PeykarPrint

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How Lack of Sleep Can Effect Your Diabetes

In your childhood you might have come across an interesting question. Which is the first one? An egg? Or a chick? The relationship between lack of sleep and diabetes is some thing like that. Numerous experiments prove that lack of enough sound sleep increases the risk of diabetes. And vice-versa is also true.

The importance of sound sleep on our overall health is stressed by so many health experts. Diabetes experts also found interesting results in this area.
Let me explain the relation between sleep and diabetes to you.

The pattern of the blood circulation and chemical characteristics of blood change when we sleep. The energy consumption of our body varies according to the pattern of our sleep. Energy and blood circulation both are very much related with glucose needs of the body. Disorders in blood glucose levels cause type2 diabetes. This is the primary logic behind the relation of sleep and diabetes.

The experiments conducted in this area reveal the following facts.

1. Women who slept only five hours for a day face risk of diabetes 2, ½ times more than those who slept seven or eight hours.
2. When you have less sleep for a whole week, your insulin and blood sugar levels are almost mimic the diabetic patients.
3. Young healthy adults needed more insulin to dispose of the same amount of glucose after experiencing lack of sound sleep for three days. (Insulin is a hormone that permits the transfer of blood sugar into cells.) The decrease in insulin sensitivity is equal in its negative effect to that of gaining 20 to 30 pounds.
4. If you already have diabetes, a pattern of sleep-deprivation only further contributes to a flux in blood sugars.
5. Lack of sleep also reduces the release of appetite controlling chemicals in our body. This causes obesity and paves path for type2 diabetes.

Some results show that inadequate sleep (not enough, or poor quality sleep) is associated with a deterioration of blood glucose control, as expressed by an increased HbA1c, (A type of Hemoglobin). You may already know that this hemoglobin is the carrier of glucose in our blood.

So we have strong evidences to prove that poor sleep is responsible for the worsening of diabetic control.

But we can not prescribe “having sound sleep for 8 hours a day”, as a medicine for blood glucose control for diabetic patients. We can only say that a sound sleep increases the positive effects of other medicines. The other factors such as reducing body weight, regular exercise are having their own importance and influence in diabetes control.

Unfortunately general symptoms of diabetes will lead to sleep disturbance making this as vicious circle. For example, diabetes causes heavy urination which interrupts the sound sleep.

By the above discussion we can conclude that diabetic patients need to keep an eye on their sleep habits. A sound always improves your general health and reduces the risk of diabetes as well as other diseases. No one can deny undermine the refreshing abilities of sound sleep. Is not it?

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