San Francisco: The research found that people who sleep later and get up later may both have a higher chance of acquiring diabetes than those who get enough sleep.
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, looked at the effect of lifestyle variables as well as the association between chronotype (a person’s preferred time of sleep and waking) and diabetes risk and discovered that it was linked to a 19% higher risk of the disease.
The research, which was published in the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine, examined 63,676 female nurses’ records.
According to the results, 11% had evening chronotypes, 35% had morning chronotypes, and 54% had intermediate chronotypes.
When lifestyle was taken into account, the risk of diabetes was reduced from 72% for those with an evening chronotype to 19%.
The percentage of evening chronotypes was just 6% for the best lifestyles compared to 25% for the unhealthiest.
The first author, Sina Kianersi, a postdoctoral research student in the Brigham’s Channing Division of Network Medicine, said: “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.
Additionally, they discovered that nurses who worked day shifts rather than overnight shifts were the only ones who showed a relationship between the evening chronotype and diabetes risk.
According to Tianyi Huang, an associate epidemiologist at Brigham, “we saw an increase in type 2 diabetes risk when chronotype was not matched with work hours.”
That was yet another highly intriguing discovery that could support the case for more individualised job scheduling.
Researchers also discovered that those with evening chronotypes were more likely to consume larger amounts of alcohol, consume poor-quality foods, sleep for less hours each night, smoke now, and have unhealthy weight, BMI, and physical activity levels.
Physicians might more effectively customise preventative tactics for their patients if a causal relationship between chronotype and diabetes or other illnesses could be established, according to Kianersi.
