Washington, Sept 21 : A new study has warned that overweight teenagers who don’t get adequate sleep at night are prone to develop type 2 diabetes.

The finding supports mounting evidence that cutting back on sleep can have a profound impact on health.

Study investigator Dorit Koren, M. D., a pediatric endocrinologist at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and her colleagues studied 62 obese adolescents with a mean age of 14 years.

Over one and a half days, the children, who were white, African American and Hispanic teenagers, underwent glucose testing and an overnight sleep study.

The researchers also studied “sleep architecture,” analyzing stages of sleep such as slow-wave “deep” sleep and rapid eye movement (dream) sleep.

They found that the optimal sleep duration was neither too little nor too much and both insufficient and excessive sleep were linked to higher glucose levels.

While sleep stages did not predict glucose levels, lower duration of N3 (“deep” sleep) correlated with decreased insulin secretion.

The current study is the first to associate sleep duration with glucose levels in children and to report a link between N3 sleep and insulin secretion.

“Our study found to keep glucose levels stable, the optimal amount of sleep for teenagers is 7.5 to 8.5 hours per night.”

“We will seek to confirm these findings with home-based studies of sleep patterns in obese teenagers. In the meantime, our study reinforces the idea that getting adequate sleep in adolescence may help protect against type 2 diabetes,” she added.

The study appears online Sept. 20 in the journal Diabetes Care. (ANI)