“Our study contributes new information to support the importance of sleep health in midlife, particularly maintaining regular sleep schedules over time, to reduce the risk of adverse cardiometabolic conditions,” said Kelsie Full, PhD, MPH, a behavioral epidemiologist and assistant professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Unhealthy sleep patterns
Unhealthy/suboptimal sleep duration is defined as being sleeping more than nine hours a night or fewer than seven hours. Previous research has found that low-income adults are more likely to sleep poorly and have diabetes. Other research has also shown that Black adults are more likely to experience long-term unhealthy sleep patterns and a disproportionately high burden of diabetes.
The study
This study was based on questionnaires from around 36,000 adults who were enrolled in the Southern Community Cohort Study which follows the health of a racially and economically diverse population of participants in 12 Southeastern states who were recruited through community health centers. The sleep duration of the participants was reported in two separate surveys which were administered an average of five years apart.
“One of the main strengths of our study was that we focused on long-term sleep patterns rather than one-time measurement,” noted Xiao, associate professor of epidemiology, human genetics, and environmental sciences at the UT Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health.
“Moreover, we conducted the study in a large cohort of predominantly low-income and Black populations, which have been traditionally understudied in health research,” she said. “By focusing on longitudinal sleep patterns, we demonstrated the importance of maintaining a healthy sleep pattern over time for metabolic health.”
What they found
The researchers found the strongest association with diabetes to be among those reporting extreme changes and higher variability in sleep duration. Higher sleep variability has previously been linked to poorer control of blood glucose levels as well as being linked to obesity and diabetes.
Based on their findings the researchers concluded that their findings “suggest that a highly variable sleep duration in disadvantaged populations may be an important contributing factor to racial and socioeconomic disparities in cardiometabolic health.”
They also note that while abnormally long sleep duration may not directly cause diabetes, it may reflect other diabetes risk factors, including diabetes-related fatigue, and explain that “long sleep is still an important behavioral predictor of diabetes risk that may be used for risk prediction and disease screening.”
Additional research is required
The teams also recommended additional research to investigate and identify social and environmental factors like living in stressful, disadvantaged neighborhoods that could disrupt sleep and how sleep disruption may contribute to disparities in health outcomes.
“Intervention studies are also needed to evaluate whether improving sleep health may reduce health disparities in the USA.”
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References/Sources/Materials provided by:
https://news.vumc.org/2024/07/18/unhealthy-sleep-linked-to-diabetes-in-a-diverse-population/
