Poor sleep patterns linked to diabetes, dementia, and 170 diseases

Evan Walker
Evan Walker TheMediTary.Com |
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Researchers have found a link between sleep quality and disease risk with many chronic conditions. Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images

Getting enough quality sleep every night is important for good Health. However, some people may still be unclear about what “quality sleep” entails and what impact sleep really has on their Health.

“[Until] now we have not completely understood how sleep builds our health,” Qing Chen, PhD, associate professor at the Institute of Toxicology in the College of Preventive Medicine at the Third Military Medical University (Army Medical University) in China, told Medical News Today.

“Maybe we only know that sleep deprivation is harmful. No scientist has 100% confidence to tell us when we should sleep or when we should not sleep, [or] whether there are additional sleep tips that are important for health,“ said Chen. “This is not enough to make a really healthy sleep schedule.”

Chen is the co-lead author of a study recently published in the journal Health Data Science that has linked 172 different diseases to poor sleep patterns. Of those diseases, 92 had over 20% of the risk correlated with poor sleep behavior.

For this study, researchers analyzed medical data from more than 88,000 adults in the UK Biobank database to measure both their sleep traits and disease diagnoses.

After an average 7-year follow-up, researchers associated 172 diseases with poor sleep patterns, including irregular bedtimes and off-circadian rhythms.

Of these, the risk for 42 diseases was at least doubled, including age-related physical debility, gangrene, fibrosis, and cirrhosis of the liver.

Chen and his team also discovered that 92 of the 172 diseases had more than 20% of their risk traceable to poor sleep, including dementia, primary hypertension, Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, and acute kidney failure.

“Sleep regularity (rhythm) should be taken into consideration, or a number of diseases may be induced, even if sleep duration is adequate,” Chen said. “This is because sleep rhythm and sleep duration may be in charge of different aspects of our health.”

We want to understand why disruption of sleep rhythm induces diseases, and how can we prevent or cure the diseases induced by sleep rhythm disruption,” he commented, when asked about the next steps for this research.

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