Short sleep duration associated with a higher prevalence of metabolic syndrome in an apparently healthy population
Highlights
► The association of sleep duration with metabolic syndrome was examined in adults. ► Short sleep duration is positively associated with metabolic syndrome in males. ► Males with short sleep duration exhibited a higher prevalence of hyperglycemia.
Introduction
Chronic sleep deprivation is increasingly common in modern society (Bonnet and Arand, 1995). U-shaped pattern have been observed for the relationships between sleep duration and all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity and increased body mass index (Buxton and Marcelli, 2010, Alvarez et al., 2004). Furthermore, both short and long sleep duration are associated with pre-diabetes (Chaput et al., 2009), a lower high density lipoprotein cholesterol level and a higher triglyceride level (Kaneita et al., 2008).
Metabolic syndrome, a clustering of cardiometabolic risk factors, including central obesity, insulin resistance, hyperglycemia, elevated blood pressure, and dyslipidemia, remains a critical public health problem because of its increasing prevalence rate and the fact that it increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality (Klein et al., 2002, Wu et al., 2010). From a physiological perspective, sleep is intricately connected to various hormonal and metabolic processes in the body (Sharma and Kavuru, 2010). Although sleep duration has been suggested to be associated with metabolic syndrome (Hall et al., 2008, Choi et al., 2008), the above studies included subjects with cerebral vascular event, coronary artery disease, thyroid dysfunction, and those using antihypertensives and hypoglycemic agents, and thus the results may overestimate the association between sleep duration and metabolic syndrome. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine the association between sleep duration and metabolic syndrome in a population without cardiovascular disease, such as coronary artery disease and cerebral vascular event, and medication known to influence blood pressure, glucose tolerance and lipid profiles.
Section snippets
Subjects
The baseline data were collected from a health examination center in National Cheng Kung University Hospital in Tainan, Taiwan, from Oct 1, 2006, to Aug 31, 2009, on the basis of secondary data without personal identification information. The Ethical Committee for Human Research at the National Cheng Kung University Hospital approved the study protocol. All subjects received a health checkup and completed a structured questionnaire, which included demographic information, medical history,
Results
Table 1 shows the comparisons of clinical characteristics among subjects with different sleep durations. There were significant differences in age, gender, education level, fasting plasma glucose, and the proportion of smoking status and exercise frequency among these three groups. Longer sleepers were younger than normal sleepers, but short sleepers were older.
A comparison of the prevalence of the components and the number of metabolic abnormalities among subjects with different sleep
Discussion
Our study provides the epidemiological evidence that short sleep duration is associated with metabolic syndrome after adjustments for the potential confounding factors of age, education level, BMI and lifestyle in a Chinese male population from Taiwan. According to reports in Asian countries, the prevalence of metabolic syndrome revealed a gender difference that men have a higher rate of metabolic syndrome than women (Hwang et al., 2007, Wu et al., 2009). Therefore, we performed a
Conclusions
Short sleep duration is an important factor positively associated with metabolic syndrome in male subjects, and short sleepers exhibited a higher prevalence of hyperglycemia also in males groups. Therefore, the promotion of lifestyle modification to obtain adequate sleep and to avoid habitual sleep deprivation could potentially serve as a primary preventive measure against the development of metabolic syndrome in male population.
Conflict of interest statement
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the grants from the Department of Family Medicine, National Cheng-Kung University Hospital (NCKUHFM-100-002). MC Wu participated in study conception and design, statistical analyses, research data interpretation, drafting and revision of the manuscript. YC Yang participated in study conception and design, statistical analyses and revision of the manuscript. CJ Chang and JS Wu participated in study conception and design, research data interpretation and revision of
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JS Wu and CJ Chang contributed equally to this work.