medwireNews: Researchers say that incident diabetes may explain why sleep patterns affect coronary heart disease (CHD) risk.
In fact, Thomas Svensson (Skåne University Hospital, Malmö, Sweden) and team found that sleep duration was only significantly associated with CHD that was preceded by diabetes; if CHD occurred in isolation there was no significant link with sleep patterns.
Short sleep duration was defined as less than 6 hours per night, and was associated with risk increases of about 35–55% for incident diabetes, 40% for all CHD, and more than 200% for diabetes-preceded CHD, compared with normal sleep duration (7–8 hours).
The research is based on data from the Malmö Diet Cancer Study cohort, which included 6966 men and 9378 women aged 45–73 years. The effects of short sleep duration on diabetes and diabetes-preceded CHD were significant in both sexes, but Svensson and team also found that long sleep duration, of over 9 hours, had a similar influence in men only.
This association was significant despite exclusion of the first 3 years of follow-up and of people with diabetes or CHD at baseline, leading the researchers to conclude they were seeing a genuine sex difference, rather than detecting reverse causation in the male participants.
This highlights “the need for sex-stratified analyses with regard to diabetes risk factors and CHD complications,” they conclude in Diabetologia.
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