Poor Sleep Threatens Health?

For years, life of sleep has been linked to a wide collection of metabolic conditions, including obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. But until the recent studies, health researchers did not know much about the effect of inconsistent sleep, including nightly changes in sleep amount and timing.

Tianyi Huang is among the writers of the study. Huang is with the Brigham and Womens Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. In an email to Reuters News Agency, Huang said that more inconsistent sleep times are associated with higher metabolic disease risk. And that is no matter if one has short or long sleep duration or has good or poor sleep quality.

The researcher explained that night to night differences in sleep, either duration or timing, are associated with a high risk of having several metabolic problems at the same time. For the study, 2003 patients did home based sleep studies for one week. They used devices known as actigraphs, which measure night time room mate and sleep wake cycles. The study was published in Diabetes Care.

A total of 707 patients, or 35 percent, had metabolic syndrome several types of metabolic problems that increase heart disease risks. They included increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, more fat around the stomatch, and abnormal levels of some body chemicals.

Compared to people who had less than one hour of change in sleep duration, people whose sleep duration changed by 60 to 90 minutes were 27 percent more likely to have metabolic syndrome. The increase rose to 41 percent for people with 90 to 120 minutes of a change in sleep duration. It rose to 57 percent with more than two hoursof change in sleep duration.