Sleepless nights and stress ‘raise male diabetes risk’

Older men with psychological stress face more than double the risk of developing type two diabetes, new research claims.

The study found that anxiety, insomnia, depression, apathy and fatigue can affect the risk of the disease, which affects over two million people in the UK.

But the same link was not observed between older women with psychological distress and type two diabetes.

Scientists studied 2,127 men born between 1938 and 1957 who had normal blood glucose levels.

They determined their level of psychological distress both at the beginning and end of the study and the men were tested for diabetes eight to ten years later.

The results, published in the journal Diabetic Medicine, revealed that men with the highest levels of psychological distress were 2.2 times more likely to develop type two diabetes than those with the lowest levels.

The link was independent of other factors including age, body mass index (BMI), family history of diabetes, smoking, physical activity and socio-economic background.

Dr Iain Frame, director of research at charity Diabetes UK, said it is “intriguing” that psychological distress appears to affect type two diabetes risk only in men and said it would be “interesting to find out why”.

“The results suggest that it could be due to a hormonal or behavioural influence,” he added.

Lead researcher Professor Anders Ekbom from the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, said: “The link could be a result of the way psychological distress affects the brain’s role in regulating hormones or perhaps because depression influences a person’s diet and level of physical activity in a negative way.”