Diabetes Type 2 Treatment: Sleeping More on Weekends can Help Lower the Risk

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For those who have created a lifestyle where getting enough sleep on weekdays is some vain hope, catching up for extra snooze time on the weekends could prove to be beneficial to your health.

A new study conducted by researchers from the University of Chicago found that, while having insufficient sleep, like four or five hours a day, could increase the risk of diabetes, getting an extended sleep for just a couple of nights could make up for it and counteract the adverse effect.

"It gives us some hope that if there is no way to extend sleep during the week, people should try very hard to protect their sleep when they do get an opportunity to sleep in and sleep as much as possible to pay back the sleep debt," said lead study author Josaine Broussard of the University of Colorado Boulder.

"We don't know if people can recover if the behavior is repeated every week," he added in an e-mail to Reuter's Health. "It is likely though that if any group of people suffer from sleep loss, getting extra sleep will be beneficial."

People who often can't get enough sleep have greater risks of suffering from other health problems like obesity, high blood pressure, and cognitive deficiencies, says the researchers.

Broussard and his team worked with 19 healthy male volunteers for the study. They asked the group to get enough sleep for four days at 8.5 hours a night. For the next two days, they were allowed to binge sleep for about 9.7 hours a night to get that extended sleep. Then, the participants were asked to doze off for just 4.5 hours a night for another four days.

The researchers took note of the participants' insulin sensitivity and disposition index, which is a a predictor of diabetes risk, wrote Medical News Today. The findings suggest that the four-night sleep deprivation lowers the insulin sensitivity by 23 percent and their risk of diabetes increased by 16 percent. But, after getting the extended sleep for two days, the parameters were back to normal.

According to Columbia University researcher James Gangwisch, who was not part of the study, one of the limitations of the findings is that it may not be reflective of the risk for those who are obese and overweight, people who are older and those who have other potent risk factors for diabetes.

But he also added that, "by catching up on sleep on the weekends, people are reducing average extent and severity of the effects of sleep deprivation. Ideally, we would all get sufficient sleep on a nightly basis."