How poor sleep impacts type 2 diabetes patients' skin

Washington: If you are a diabetic with a disrupted sleep pattern, you might need more time to heal skin wounds, finds a study.

The researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville 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. These results confirm that sleep plays an especially important role in wound healing among obese mice with 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 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.

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.

The findings have been published in the journal Sleep.