Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ lowers risk of diabetes
Long hours of sleep in the weekend are found to cancel out the risk of diabetes brought by short hours of sleep in work days.
Sleeping just four or five hours a week can increase the risk of diabetes by 16 percent—a risk comparable to being obese.
“In this short-term study, we found that two long nights spent catching up on lost sleep can reverse the negative metabolic effects of four consecutive nights of restricted sleep,” said study author Josiane Broussard, PhD, now an assistant research professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The study monitored the sleep of 19 healthy young volunteers. They slept and average of 4.3 hours in the weekdays and 9.7 hours in the weekends. Insulin tests prove that the extended sleep returned the diabetes risk to normal sleep levels.
Scientists were encouraged by the result, but said more studies need to be conducted since in the short term study, volunteers only went under the process once.
“Though this is evidence that weekend catch-up sleep may help someone recover from a sleep-deprived week,” Broussard said, “this was not a long-term study and our subjects went through this process only once. Going forward we intend to study the effects of extended weekend sleep schedules in people who repeatedly curtail their weekday sleep.”
The study was performed in the University of Chicago and published in the journal Diabetes Care.
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