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According to a new study from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, type 2 diabetes and poor sleep could extend time of wound healing. Researchers found that overweight mice with Type 2 diabetes and disrupted sleep needed more time to heal skin wounds than mice that also had disrupted sleep but didn’t have Type 2 diabetes.
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 a normal sleep schedule and sleep that was repeatedly interrupted.
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. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people with prediabetes are at higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.
In people with Type 2 diabetes, high glucose levels lead to poor blood circulation and nerve damage, making the body more vulnerable to infections, especially after surgery. Sleep disorders can also weaken the immune system and slow healing. Sleep disorders and Type 2 diabetes are connected; it has been widely documented that lack of sleep can create metabolic changes like those seen in patients with insulin resistance.