A quality sleep is essential for a quality life. Placing this point forward, according to a new study, lack of sleep can lead to high levels of insulin resistance in adolescents and escalate their risks of developing diabetes.
"High levels of insulin resistance can lead to the development of diabetes," lead author Dr. Karen Matthews, of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry, said in a statement.
"We found that if teens that normally get six hours of sleep per night get one extra hour of sleep, they would improve insulin resistance by 9 percent."
Researchers Karen Matthews and colleagues included 245 healthy high school students to examine the association between sleep duration and insulin resistance.
For the study, the participants underwent a fasting blood test and were provided with a wrist actigraph (a device used to monitor human rest or activity levels) for one week. Race, age, gender, waist circumference and body mass index of the children were also taken into consideration. Participants were found only getting an average of 6.4 hours over the week.
Proving the researchers theory, shorter sleep showed higher insulin resistance.
"Reduced sleep duration is associated with HOMA-IR (homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance) in adolescence. Long sleep duration is not associated. Interventions to extend sleep duration may reduce diabetes risk in youth," the authors wrote.
Findings of the study have been published in the October issue of the journal SLEEP.
According to National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), teens need at least nine hours of sleep per night, but getting lesser than 6.5 hours only. According to them, lack of sleep affects a child's mood, performance and health.
Following are the five reasons behind getting enough sleep provided by NHLBI :
- Drowsy teen drivers lead to accidents
- Drowsy teens perform poorly in school and more likely to face many social problems
- Teens lacking enough sleep find difficulties in making good decisions
- Lack of sleep affects their looks
- Teens without enough sleep react slowly and perform worse in sports compared to other children having sound sleep
