As if getting older weren’t hard enough, new research shows that middle-aged and older women who have trouble falling or staying asleep may pack on more pounds than their well-rested peers.
The new findings, reported in the International Journal of Obesity, strengthen the evidence that sleep problems are related to weight gain. In this case, the study design allowed the researchers to show that sleep problems came before substantial weight gain in some participants.
Finnish researchers followed more than 7,300 40- to 60-year-old adults for seven years. They found that women who reported significant sleep problems at the outset generally put on more weight over time than women who slept well. Roughly one-third of women with frequent sleep problems gained at least 11 pounds, versus about a fifth of women with no sleep difficulties at the outset. The link in the women persisted even when the investigators accounted for a number of factors that can affect both sleep quality and weight gain — including participants’ body weight at the study’s start, their exercise habits and their general physical and mental health.
Men’s sleep problems apparently were not related to weight gain. However, the smaller number of men in the study– 1,300 versus more than 5,700 women — may have made any potential effect among men harder to detect.
While the findings do not prove cause-and-effect, they raise the possibility that improving sleep quality might help stave off excess weight gain. There is evidence that sleep loss alters people’s levels of the appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin — which could, in theory, spur them to overeat.
Source: Reuters Health –link.reuters.com/nub45m International Journal of Obesity, online June 8, 2010.
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