Poor sleep may delay wound healing in diabetes patients

According to a new study, researchers at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. have found that Poor sleep in type 2 diabetes may lead to slower wound healing. The research has appeared in the journal SLEEP.

One in three adult Americans suffers from prediabetes and are at higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives. As it is people with Type 2 diabetes, high glucose levels and poor blood circulation and nerve damage have slow wound healing. Furthermore, Sleep disorders can also weaken the immune system and slow healing.

For the experiment, scientists used obese mice with features of Type 2 diabetes and compared them to healthy mice of normal weight. While deeply anesthetized, both groups of mice got a small surgical wound on the skin of their backs. The scientists analyzed how long it took the wound to heal under two scenarios: a normal sleep schedule and sleep that was repeatedly interrupted.

The result: the diabetic mice with fragmented sleep needed about 13 days for their wounds to achieve 50 percent healing. By contrast, even with sleep interruptions, the wounds of normal-weight healthy mice reached the same milestone in about five days.

Treating wounds in diabetic patients is not only challenging at a clinical level, it can also get expensive. Just in the United States, the cost of treating nonhealing wounds is estimated to top $50 billion a year.

"This is a public health issue, and we want to contribute to a solution," Lydic said.

Sleep disorders and Type 2 diabetes are intimately connected; it has been widely documented that lack of sleep can create metabolic changes like those seen in patients with insulin resistance. The results of the study confirm that sleep plays an especially important role in wound healing among obese mice with Type 2 diabetes.