Obese adolescents who don't get enough sleep could have a higher risk of developing conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and stroke down the road.
Sleep deprivation and obesity have been linked to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in both children and adults, but little is known about these correlations in adolescents, a University of Michigan Health System news release reported.
Adolescents are notorious for not getting enough sleep, and their obesity and overweight prevalence is at about 30 percent.
Researchers looked at 37 obese adolescents; their "fasting cholesterol and blood sugar, waist circumference, body mass index, and blood pressure," were measured to create a cardiometabolic risk score, the news release reported.
The participants were fitted with physical activity monitors for 24 hours a day over the course of a week to monitor sleep and exercise patterns.
Only a third of the participants met the minimum recommendations of 60 minutes of physical activity per day. The majority of the subjects got seven hours of sleep and woke up at least once during the night. Only five of the participants got the recommended eight hours per night.
Even when factors such as physical activity and BMI low sleep levels still remained a primary predictor of cardiometabolic risk in obese teens.
"This shows that even among those already considered at risk for cardiometabolic disease, in this case obese teens' decreased sleep duration was predictive of increased cardiometabolic risk. The study cannot determine whether lack of sleep causes cardiometabolic disease or if obesity, or other factors cause sleep disturbances," the news release concluded.
"However, the strong association between sleep duration and cardiometabolic risk score independent of the effects of body composition and physical activity suggest a potential influence of sleep duration on cardiometabolic health in obese adolescents," lead author Heidi IglayReger, Ph.D., supervisor of the Physical Activity Laboratory at the Michigan Metabolomics and Obesity Center, said in the news release.
