Did you know! Lack of sleep may contribute to adverse weight gain, finds a study.Researchers at Uppsala University have demonstrated that one night of sleep loss has a tissue-specific impact on the regulation of gene expression and metabolism in humans.This may explain how shift work and chronic sleep loss impairs our metabolism and adversely affects our body composition.In the new study, the researchers studied 15 healthy normal-weight individuals who participated in two in-lab sessions in which activity and meal patterns were highly standardised. In randomised order, the participants slept a normal night of sleep (over eight hours) during one session and were instead kept awake the entire night during the other session.The morning after each night-time intervention, small tissue samples (biopsies) were taken from the participants’ subcutaneous fat and skeletal muscle. These two tissues often exhibit disrupted metabolism in conditions such as obesity and diabetes.
At the same time in the morning, blood samples were also taken to enable a comparison across tissue compartments of a number of metabolites. These metabolites comprise sugar molecules, as well as different fatty and amino acids.
The tissue samples were used for multiple molecular analyses, which first of all revealed that the sleep loss condition resulted in a tissue-specific change in DNA methylation, one form of mechanism that regulates gene expression.
