Sleeping more on weekends does not make up for past sleep loss

Healthline Media, Inc. would like to process and share personal data (e.g., mobile ad id) and data about your use of our site (e.g., content interests) with our third party partners (see a current list) using cookies and similar automatic collection tools in order to a) personalize content and/or offers on our site or other sites, b) communicate with you upon request, and/or c) for additional reasons upon notice and, when applicable, with your consent. High insulin sensitivity is usually a marker of good health, while low sensitivity to this hormone — called "insulin resistance" — can indicate diabetes.While the decrease in insulin sensitivity among those in the restricted sleep group was not a surprise, the participants who had caught up on sleep at the weekend did not, in fact, experience much better results.Despite their weekend lie-in, these participants still had lower insulin sensitivity than usual, and once they started experiencing sleep loss again during the week, their insulin sensitivity, both overall and in the liver and muscles specifically, decreased by between 9 and 27 percent."Our findings show that muscle- and liver-specific insulin sensitivity were worse in subjects who had weekend recovery sleep," notes first author Christopher Depner, adding that this particular finding was surprising for the research team."This finding was not anticipated and further shows that weekend recovery sleep is not likely [to be] an effective sleep-loss countermeasure regarding metabolic health when sleep loss is chronic."Christopher DepnerIn the future, the research team aims to explore further whether or not sleep catch-up strategies, including daytime napping, can reverse the damage of sleep loss, and if so, to what extent and under what circumstances.Your privacy is important to us.Healthline Media UK Ltd, Brighton, UK.© 2004-2019 All rights reserved.