Sleep Enough to Prevent Diabetes

Over time, depriving yourself of sleep each night may increase your risk of developing diabetes.

In a study, after following more than 70,000 diabetes-free women for a 10-year period, researchers found that women who slept 5 hours or less every night were 34% more likely to develop diabetes symptoms than women who slept for seven or eight hours each night. The same could be said for subjects who slept 9 hours or more each day.

Researchers were not certain why sleeping too much or too little might be linked to diabetes, though one theory involves leptin, a hormone that may play a role in signaling the body to stop eating.

Too little sleep may reduce levels of leptin, possibly causing people to gain weight and develop diabetes. When researchers removed factors such as overweight and obesity, too little sleep was not linked to diabetes, which suggests that sleep may indirectly affect diabetes by promoting weight gain.

One theory why too much sleep may increase diabetes risk is that people who sleep a lot tend to have poorer health in general. They may also have sleep apnea, a condition that may prevent restful sleep and cause people to sleep more overall due to feeling tired.