Type 2 diabetes risk linked to troubled sleep

[DiabeticBloke1]

Hello folks, I've just read about a new study by the University of South Australia, which has found a link between troubled sleep and Type 2 diabetes. They say that there are about one million adults in Australia with Type 2 diabetes, and over 422 million worldwide. In their study, they found that participants who have trouble sleeping are more likely to have indicators of poor cardio-metabolic health which contributes to Type 2 diabetes.

If they had asked me, I could have told them that too (as I'll bet, could many people on this forum). Before being diagnosed with Type 2, I had a very poor sleep pattern - every night - due to various factors, including my university studies, a newborn baby and marital problems. My other health issues, including sleep apnoea and heart failure, followed shortly afterwards.

Interestingly, their study found that "how soundly we sleep, when we go to bed and get up, and how regular our sleep habits are, may be just as important as sleep duration." They conclude that "we must prioritise our sleep to help stay in good health".

I thought I'd suggest this as a new thread, because it would be very interesting to hear your thoughts on this subject. I don't think I'm allowed to link to their website, but you could Google it using "University of South Australia" and "sleep" and "diabetes". Cheers, DB1.

 

[PatsyB]

Never had any trouble sleeping before Diabetes but now am up at all hours which is so annoying

 

[Outlier]

As a troubled child, and an ex-shiftworker as an adult, I have had trouble sleeping all my life. Now the challenges of old age make sleep tricky. While the study's point is valid, there's a lot more to it than pinpointing one health issue.

 

[Oldvatr]

You can bend statistics to support any Point of View nowadays. In the Old Days they ringfenced the study and tried to elimintate external influences. Now they just takre measurements at start, then tell the peole to come back in a few months or years, repeat the mesurements and then make claims about what changed, without taking into account what lifestyle changes may have done to also alter the outcome.

In the UK they had sleep labs where volunteers lived within the experiment for weeks and months in isolation. Even then they struggled to make much sense of the results. I think they are still looking. We also had cold labs looking for cures for the common cold, but that too ran into difficlties and have yet to produce neaningful and repeatable results. If you look at many drug studies, they use veterans hospitals and old peoples convalescent homes, when most of the patients are elderly and already ailing. Then they pump new meds into them to see if they are safe. If a few of the respondents die that that is life and nothing to do with the medication and can be ignored by the study as being naturl causes. I remember that the Actos and Avandia trials were run like this. Now we know these meds can trigger fatal events and have largely been withdrawn. The deaths that did occur during the FDA licence process were all declared as being unconnected to the drug being trialled and were left out of the statistics and the final report.