Social Jet Lag
By Erik Ness
Irregular sleep patterns associated with intense weekday work may drive diabetes and obesity. And sleep deprivation boosts the risk of hypertension, Alzheimer's, even cancer.
If you ever have the impulse to smash your alarm clock, Ludwig-Maximilians University biologist Till Roenneberg understand. This year he described the increasingly common phenomenon of '' social jet lag,'' experienced by those who sleep short on workdays, then stay up later but sleep longer on weekends. If that is your pattern, you are more likely to be depressed and obese. ''Sleep is one of the most underrated phenomena in modern society,'' Roenneberg says. A growing body of research is showing that if you do not get enough or get it at the wrong times, you expose yourself to a wide range of health consequences.
Eve Van Cauter, the University of chicago, began researching the connection between sleep deprivation, diabetes. and obesity more than a decade ago. This year her team discovered that sleep deprivation obstructs the metabolism of glucose, the sugar that powers the body, in fat cells by a startling 30 percent.
Lack of sleep affects appetite, too: A 2012 Swedish brain-scan study identified heightened activity in the right anterior cingulate cortex-a brain region associated with hunger control-in the sleep-deprived.
Sleep loss is increasingly being implicated in other health conditions as well.
A Penn state study showed that short sleep combined with insomnia heightened the risk of hypertension.
European data linked restless or otherwise troubled sleep in older adults to a 36 percent increased risk of Alzheimer's.
More unexpected, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison uncovered a link between sleep apnea, a temporary breathless condition, and cancer mortality: Cancer deaths among patients with severe apnea were five times higher than among those without.