In a group of nearly 800 healthy people, we observed sex-specific relationships between sleep duration and glucose metabolism.
Is there anything more refreshing and invigorating than a good night’s sleep? Waking up the morning following a deep, restful snooze is a wonderful way to start the day, especially if you’re a woman. Extra sleep, a Dutch-led team that studied the sleep patterns of 800 middle-aged, healthy men and women to discern the link between sleep and diabetes determined that extra sleep reduces a woman’s chance of developing diabetes while men who get extra sleep increase their chances.
The experiment involved volunteers who were instructed to wear a device that tracked their sleep. They also underwent tests to determine how efficiently their bodies were using insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar and prevents the rise of diabetes.
The volunteers’ average sleep session was seven hours and 18 minutes. But when the women managed more shut-eye than the average, their bodies became more efficient at using insulin. And the longer they surrendered to dreams, the more responsive their bodies were to the hormone, eliminating their risk of diabetes. Women are luckier than men in this area because a lack of sleep is also linked to their better use of insulin.
However, for men, sleep poses a completely different set of questions. If they remained unconscious longer than the average they harmed their ability to use insulin, making them more prone to diabetes.
Dr. Femke Rutters, a researcher at the VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam, noted: “In a group of nearly 800 healthy people, we observed sex-specific relationships between sleep duration and glucose metabolism.”
In men, Rutters said, sleeping too much or too little was associated with less responsiveness from the cells in the body to insulin resulting in reduced glucose uptake and thus increasing their chances of developing diabetes somewhere down the road. “In women, however, no such association was observed.”
The research confirms the importance of sleep as a key aspect of health. The research confirms that men manage to get less deep, restorative sleep than women, and so their health appears more likely to suffer as a consequence of sleep deficiency.
