[Sleep curtailment: Risk for development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes]

Abstract

Global epidemy of the obesity that developed all over the world, including highly industralized as well as non-industrialized countries, and parallel epidemy of Type 2 diabetes resulted in explosion of investigation devoted to explanation of pathogenetic mechanisms of this serious social and medical problems with the main idea to find adequate way of prevention as well as of treatment. Together with the observed epidemy of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, it was found parallel tendency for sleep curtailment, that was confirmed in numerous epidemiological studies, that coincide with its beginning and progress with this two epidemies. This facts lead to investigations with the idea to try to explaine possible mechanisms of the association between sleep curtailment, obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Having in mind that insulin resistance is one of the fundamental pathogenetic mechanism in these disorders, numerous studies were done with the aim to explain association between sleep curtailment and insulin resistance in obesity, Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. It was demonstrated that sleep curtailment may affect energy homeostasis of human organism with the effects on body weight increase through three different ways: appetite increase, prolongation of time for food intake and through decrease of energy expenditure. There are several postulated mechanism for the effect of sleep curtailment on development of insulin resistance as well as for predisposition for Type 2 diabetes. Among possible mechanism are included: increase of sympathetic neuronal activity, decreased cerebral utilisation of glucose, increase in evening cortisol values, growth hormone increase and disorder of neuroendocrine control of appetite which leads to risk for increase of body weight.