What might be making you a tad apprehensive, but might not, as it's too soon to tell

[BigV]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

Our family motto is, "When the going gets tough, the tough get napping."

Sleep is awesome!

Sleep is awesome. Plus it prevents diabetes. Kinda.

Sleep deprivation caused a 30% decline in the insulin sensitivity of fat cells of healthy, lean young adults, according to a study in the Oct. 6 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

Restricting sleep for 4 nights markedly impaired the phosphorylation of Akt within the adipocytes in subcutaneous fat, which is a crucial early step in the pathway that mediates most of insulin's metabolic action. "This finding identifies for the first time a molecular mechanism that may be involved in the reduction in total-body insulin sensitivity consistently observed in multiple laboratory studies of partial sleep deprivation in healthy adults," said Josiane L. Broussard, Ph.D., and her associates at the University of Chicago.

--snip--

Insufficient sleep is known to raise the risk of metabolic disturbances, particularly insulin resistance, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. But "to our knowledge, no studies to date have linked sleep restriction to alterations in molecular metabolic pathways in any peripheral human tissue." Dr. Broussard and her colleagues examined whether experimental sleep restriction would reduce insulin sensitivity in subcutaneous fat, "a peripheral tissue that is a key site of insulin action and plays a pivotal role in energy metabolism as well as in the communication of energy balance to the brain."

Six men and one woman aged 18-30 years (mean age 23.7 years) who were healthy and lean were selected from the community as study subjects. All reported routine sleep times of 7.5-8.5 hours/night. All underwent overnight polysomnography to ensure they had no sleep disorders, standard glucose tolerance testing to rule out any occult disorders of insulin metabolism, and standard laboratory tests to rule out any other problem that could affect either sleep or metabolism.

These subjects were then assessed under two experimental sleep conditions in randomized order: after 4 consecutive nights of 8.5 hours of normal sleep and after 4 consecutive nights of 4.5 hours of restricted sleep. The subjects lived as sedentary inpatients during these experiments, with strictly controlled diets that were identical under the two sleep conditions.