Associations between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes in Taiwanese adults: A population-based study

Research on the association between sleep duration and type 2 diabetes in an adult community population has been relatively scarce. The objective of this study was to analyze the association between sleep duration and the risk of diabetes in Taiwanese adults.

Secondary data analysis was based on the database of Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan between 2005 and 2008. A stratified three-staged probability sampling method was used to create a cross-sectional research design and 1533 participants (733 men, 800 women, between 19 years and 64 years of age) were selected in this study. Logistic regression models were conducted to estimate the effect of sleep duration for type 2 diabetes patients.

The average sleep duration for all participants in this study was 7.2 ± 1.4 hours, with 35.1% of the participants having a sleep duration less than 7 hours. After controlling related confounders, such as age, sex, body mass index, abdominal circumference, total cholesterol levels, sleep disturbances, and hypertension, the risk of having diabetes for participants with ≤ 5 hours sleep was 2.04-fold (95% confidence interval, 1.05-3.95) higher than for participants with 7-8.9 hours of sleep. In particular, the risk of having diabetes for young adults (between 19 years and 44 years of age) with ≤5 hours of sleep was 5.24-fold (95% confidence interval, 1.17-23.47) higher than for young adults who reported 7-8.9 hours of sleep.

Our results show that a short sleep duration was associated with a higher prevalence of diabetes and this correlation was particularly strong in young adults.