Frequent sleep disturbance has been linked to an increased risk of all-cause mortality in a new study.
Malcolm von Schantz, Professor of Chronobiology at the University of Surrey, UK, and his team explain in the Journal of Sleep Research yesterday (8 June) that non-communicable diseases including diabetes "are partly responsible for the deceleration of improvements of life expectancy in many countries".
They set out to discover whether sleep disturbances, especially in people with diabetes, are linked to mortality. To do so they used figures from the UK Biobank on 487,728 people followed for nearly a decade.
Just under a quarter of people said they never or rarely had sleep disturbance, just under half sometimes did, and just over a quarter reported they usually have sleep disturbance.
Taking into account age and sex, those who had frequent sleep disturbance were at an 11% raised risk of death from all causes. Those with diabetes (mainly type 2 diabetes in this group) but no sleep disturbance were at a 67% raised risk, and those with both were at an 87% raised risk.
The authors conclude: "Complaints of difficulty falling or staying asleep merit attention by physicians."
Professor von Schantz said: “Although we already knew that there is a strong link between poor sleep and poor health, this illustrates the problem starkly.
“The question asked when the participants enrolled does not necessarily distinguish between insomnia and other sleep disorders, such as sleep apnoea. Still, from a practical point of view it doesn’t matter. Doctors should take sleep problems as seriously as other risk factors and work with their patients on reducing and mitigating their overall risk.”
von Schantz, M. et al. Associations between sleep disturbances, diabetes and mortality in the UK Biobank cohort: A prospective population-based study. Journal of Sleep Research 8 June 2021; doi: 10.1111/jsr.13392
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