Extremes of sleep time tied to increased mortality risk in Diabetes: Study

Diabetes is a worldwide public health crisis. Globally, the prevalence of diabetes was 8.8% in 2017, affecting an estimated 424.9 million people. This number is predicted to increase to 628.6 million by 2045.

Using data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) in the USA, "We specifically sought to examine the relationship between sleep duration and all-cause and cause-specific mortality in people with type 2 diabetes across sex, age at diagnosis, duration of diabetes and treatment type", says Yafeng Wang, from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Health Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.

The study aimed to investigate whether the effects of sleep duration interacted with the presence of diabetes. Wang and his associates studied a total of 273,029 adults, including 248,817 without diabetes and 24,212 with type 2 diabetes, who participated in the National Health Interview Survey from 2004 to 2013 and whose data were linked to a mortality database up to 31 December 2015.

"In this population-based prospective cohort study, we observed that the absolute mortality rate was higher in adults with diabetes and extremes of sleep duration", he further added.

Extremes of sleep duration was associated with significant increases in all-cause and disease-specific mortality risk among people with type 2 diabetes.

The other findings of the research exclaimed that there was a non-significant interaction between sleep duration and the presence of diabetes. Also, a J-shaped relationship existed between sleep duration and all-cause mortality risk in people with type 2 diabetes.

Compared with the reference group (7 h/day), both shorter and longer sleep durations were associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality. Similar associations were also observed for mortality risk from CVD, cancer, kidney disease, Alzheimer's disease, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.

Longer sleep duration in those with a younger age at diabetes onset was associated with greater risks of all-cause and CVD mortality. Shorter sleep duration in individuals treated with both insulin and oral glucose-lowering medication was also associated with higher risks of all-cause and CVD mortality, these were some of the other observations.

Based on the findings, the authors concluded that "The associations between sleep duration and mortality risk may be different between diabetic and non-diabetic individuals. The association was more prominent in those with a younger age at diabetes onset and receiving treatment with both oral glucose-lowering medication and insulin. This population may benefit from targeted sleep-related interventions to reduce the risks of adverse health outcomes."