Sleep Deprivation and Diabetes

by Anne Rivera

Are you so busy with work that you regularly spend the whole of your nights awake trying to get that project finished on time? Well, you probably should think twice about trading these hours of sleep for work because you just might be giving away your health along with it. Sleep deprivation causes the body to lose its resistance to many diseases and prevents your body from recovering from the many stresses it faces. And according to a study, sleep deprivation and diabetes, which is a very deadly disease, go hand in hand.

A research was conducted to see how sleep deprivation and diabetes might be related. The scientists tested for the effects of sleep deprivation to the body's ability to deal with the glucose or sugar that it takes in. The results have shown that a lack of sleep causes a person's body to be more tolerant to insulin. Insulin is the substance that the body produces to bring down its blood sugar levels and thus, with a higher tolerance to insulin, blood sugar would be much higher than normal, thus, the body has to release more insulin to regulate the blood sugar. However the body does not compensate for this need for added insulin so the extra sugar is not processed by the body well. This sugar is then turned into excess fat by the body.

The bad effects of having the levels of blood sugar caused by sleep deprivation would be comparable to your body being twenty or thirty pounds overweight. Think about it; you might be in your ideal weight and you might exercise often but due to a regular lack of sleep, you're just as healthy as someone with thirty pounds more fat than you. And all that can easily be avoided by giving yourself just enough time to rest every night.

Abnormal levels of high blood sugar can cause a person to develop type two diabetes, a leading cause of death in many countries. Diabetes leads to a lot of other sicknesses like heart disease, mental problems and complications in many of the other organs of the body. Another common symptom of diabetes is blurriness of vision. In time, if the diabetes progresses, extreme retinal damage could be the result and this leads to blindness.

Scientists have also found out that it is not just the amount of sleep deprived that can lead to diabetes. Deprivation in the quality of one's sleep also has the effect of making the body more tolerant to insulin. In experiments, they introduced some sounds into the test subjects' sleeping environment while these subjects were in the middle of sleep. They found out that these subjects ended up not processing their blood sugar as well as they usually could.

The result of these studies is clear: sleep deprivation and diabetes are very much related to each other. That is why it pays to properly prioritize the rest you are supposed to be getting every night. With such a simple things as making your sleep environment as comfortable as possible and scheduling your work so as not to interfere with sleep, you could be defending yourself from a very dangerous disease.