Short Sleep Duration with or without insomnia Increases Risk of Comorbidities: Study
Sleep is crucial to human's health and essential for a person's wellbeing. It is involved in multiple physiological mechanisms, such as metabolism, appetite regulation, immune and hormone function, and cardiovascular systems. The National Sleep Foundation recommends 7–9 h of sleep each night for adults. Short (<7 h) and long (<9 h) sleep duration has been reported to be associated with an increased risk of morbidity and mortality.
In a study, researchers have reported that short sleep duration with or without insomnia is associated with comorbidities. The study findings were published in the Sleep Medicine Reviews on January 23, 2021.
Insomnia disorder with objective short sleep duration (less than 6 h of objective sleep or sleep efficiency less than 85%) has been considered as a biologically severe subtype of insomnia associated with a higher risk of cardiometabolic disease morbidity. Keith A.Johnson and colleagues conducted a study to compared insomnia disorder with objective short and normal sleep duration, and subsequently, objective short sleep duration with and without insomnia disorder, and their associations with hypertension, type 2 diabetes and body mass index.
In this systematic review and meta-analysis, the researchers searched five databases and identified 2345 non-duplicated articles. They included 15studies (cross-sectional: n=11; cohort: n=4) for the qualitative review and 10 individual studies (cross-sectional: n=8; cohort: n=2) for the meta-analysis. They determined short sleep as <6 hours of sleep. The sample size varied from 30 to 4994 participants.
Key findings of the study were:
- Upon analysis, the researchers found that insomnia disorder with objective short sleep is associated with a high risk of hypertension (RR 1.54) and type 2 diabetes (RR 1.63),
- However, they found no such association with objective short sleep (RR, 1.31).
- They also found no association between insomnia disorder with objective short sleep and objective short sleep without insomnia disorder.
These findings suggest that insomnia with short sleep was associated with increased risk for hypertension and type 2 diabetes but not different than objective short sleep.
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