Snooze more or lose your health

[Woodmonkey]

Experts say diabetes, heart disease, weight gain can result from too little sleep, and we mean seven-plus hours
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
JOE ROJAS-BURKE
The Oregonian Staff

Without prompting from an alarm clock, you'd never wake up on time. When the conference room lights dim, your eyelids droop before the boss clicks past the first PowerPoint slide. On the bus ride home from work, you nod off between stops.

If you can relate, you probably have a serious sleep debt. And you're not alone: An estimated one in five Americans gets too little sleep most nights. That shortage of snoozing might be undermining your health more than you'd imagine.

Researchers have known for years that most adults need seven to eight hours of sleep nightly to feel fully alert and perform mentally at their best. "As far as we know, there is no way we can change that," says Cheri Mah, a researcher at Stanford University's Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory.
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Recent studies show that shorting yourself on sleep might accelerate a range of health problems, from obesity, diabetes and heart disease to allergies and infections.

"There is a convergence of evidence from epidemiology, animal experiments and human experiments that is beginning to tell a story," says Dr. Ronald Kramer, a Denver neurologist who specializes in sleep medicine. "Very few people can naturally sleep six or less hours without what we think are going to be serious health consequences."

Here are the latest findings on lack of sleep and its consequences:

Weight gain

Sleep effects: Going without sleep triggers chaos in the body systems responsible for storing fat, maintaining blood sugar and signaling the need for more food energy, which probably explains why people who have trouble sleeping tend to put on weight.

Evidence: In a study published in June, German researchers tested the effects of a single night of limiting sleep to four hours, instead of seven, in normal-weight men. The short sleep triggered a spike in a hormone called ghrelin that triggers hunger, and in a questionnaire, volunteers reported stronger food cravings.

Studies tracking limited sleep over several days show more effects: disruption in blood-sugar regulation, increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol and decreases in the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin, along with heightened levels of ghrelin.

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