Short nights increase risk of chronic disease | Sciences

People who sleep a few hours each night are more likely to develop one or more chronic diseases later in life. This is what a British research published in . showed Medicine PLoS. The link between sleep deprivation and diabetes, for example, has already been demonstrated before, but it is not yet known that the effect is very large.

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 starting at age 50. Seventy-year-olds who sleep little have a 40% greater risk of developing chronic diseases than their peers who sleep seven to eight hours.

Therefore, researchers recommend sleeping seven to eight hours a night. They found 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 study were published Tuesday. For the study, a group of about 8,000 people was followed for 25 years. Their sleep and health were checked every five years.

The caveat with the study is that only a third of the participants are women. The vast majority of 8,000 people are white men. Participants will also be slightly healthier than the average Brit.