Sleeping & waking up late may raise risk of diabetes: Study

People who sleep late and wake up late could both be at an increased risk of developing diabetes than those who sleep early, according to the study. Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, US, studied the relationship between chronotype (a person’s preferred timing of sleep and waking) and diabetes risk and looked at the role of lifestyle factors as well and found it associated with 19 per cent increased risk of diabetes. The study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, analysed the data of 63,676 female nurses. The result shows that around 11 per cent had evening chronotypes, 35 per cent morning, and 54 per cent intermediate. Those with evening chronotype had a 72 per cent higher diabetes risk, reducing to 19 per cent when factoring lifestyle. Healthiest lifestyles had only 6 per cent evening chronotypes, while unhealthiest had 25 per cent. “When we controlled our unhealthy lifestyle behaviours, the strong association between chronotype and diabetes risk was reduced but still remained, which means that lifestyle factors explain a notable proportion of this association,” said first author Sina Kianersi, a postdoctoral research student in the Brigham’s Channing Division of Network Medicine.