Short nights lead to an increased risk of chronic diseases | Sciences

Those who sleep only a few hours each night are more likely to develop one or more chronic diseases later in life. This is according to British research published in PLoS Medicine. The link between sleep deprivation and diabetes, for example, has already been proven, but the effect is not yet known.

For example, researchers have found that people who sleep five hours or less have a 30 percent higher risk of developing chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, depression, liver disease, and dementia than the age of 50. Seventy-year-olds who sleep little are at 40% more likely to develop chronic diseases than their peers who sleep seven to eight hours.

Therefore, researchers recommend sleeping seven to eight hours a night. They discovered no negative results in people who slept more than eight hours. But since this was only a small group, the researchers did not draw any scientific conclusions from this.

The results of the research were published on Tuesday. For the study, a group of nearly eight thousand people were followed for 25 years. Their sleep and health were monitored every five years.

One caveat with the study is that only a third of the participants are women. The vast majority of the eight thousand people are white men. Participants will also be slightly healthier than the average Brit.