Are you typically getting only a few hours' sleep each night?
Besides leaving you
groggy all day, your insomnia could also be raising your odds for type 2
diabetes, new research shows.
Compared to people who
slept the recommended seven/eight hours per night, folks who habitually slept
five hours per night had a 16% higher odds for the blood sugar
illness, Swedish researchers found.
Those who got only three
to four hours of shuteye faced a 41% higher risk.
Even if short sleepers
ate a healthy diet, they still showed the same rise in risk for diabetes.
"Our results are the
first to question whether a healthy diet can compensate for lack of sleep in
terms of the risk of type 2 diabetes," said study lead author Christian
Benedict, a sleep researcher at the department of pharmaceutical
biosciences at Uppsala University.
Benedict said in a
university news release that there's no need for short sleepers to panic over
the link to diabetes, but the findings should "be seen as a reminder that
sleep plays an important role in health."
The new study was based
on health and lifestyle data collected from almost 248,000 Britons as part of
the UK Biobank database.
Tracking participants for
over a decade, Benedict's group found little difference in diabetes risk for
people who got six hours of sleep per night (versus seven or eight).
However, vulnerabilities
began to appear for people who slept less than six hours.
Below
is Common Symptoms of type 2 diabetes
·
Urinating more often than usual, particularly at night.
·
Feeling very thirsty.
·
Feeling very tired.
·
Unexplained weight loss.
·
Itchiness around the genital area, or regular bouts of thrush (a
yeast infection)
·
Cuts or wounds that heal slowly.
·
Blurred vision – caused by the lens of the eye becoming dry.
Metformin (Fortamet, Glumetza, Others) is
generally the first medicine prescribed for type 2 diabetes. It works mainly by
lowering glucose production in the liver and improving the body's sensitivity
to insulin so it uses insulin more effectively.
