Another reason to get enough sleep: diabetes

Getting short-changed on sleep causes multiple harms. Here's a paper just published in the journal Diabetes Care that assessed

"the relationship between habitual sleep disturbances and the incidence of type 2 diabetes."

The authors analyzed 10 studies that included 107,756 male and female participants. Their clear-cut conclusion:

"Quantity and quality of sleep consistently and significantly predict the risk of the development of type 2 diabetes. The mechanisms underlying this relation may differ between short and long sleepers."

The mechanisms include hormone dysregulation, low-grade chronic inflammation, and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD; see earlier post on how medication can worsen this association). For help with sleep disorders there are sound functional medicine resources that address the biological component, cognitive behavioral methods (see recent post about internet-based CBT for insomnia), and neurotherapies including neurofeedback and brain wave entrainment tools.