SLEEP 2026 | Veterans with both insomnia and sleep apnea have elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes

So our study tried to ask a simple question with do sleep disorders, specifically sleep apnea, insomnia, and COMISA, which is the comorbid insomnia and sleep apnea together, do they increase the risk of type 2 diabetes or not? So we try to look at fairly young data to make sure we have a clean answer. So we look at 1 million post-9/11 veterans in the VA system who did not have diabetes or pre-diabetes at their baseline. So average age of those veterans were 52, and most of them have no comorbidities and no cardiac history. They’re young. And then what we did, we followed them. The average follow-up for them was seven and a half years between those patients and see which one developed diabetes. Again, because those patients are healthy, they’re less likely to have other confounders that could cause the incidence of diabetes. So we compared three groups, veterans with no sleep disorder, veterans with insomnia only, veterans with sleep apnea only, and veterans with sleep apnea and insomnia together. And the pattern showed a clear gradient. So insomnia carried a moderate increase, where like 40% increase in type 2 diabetes down the line. Sleep apnea was much stronger, almost like five times the risk. And COMISA was the highest, six times the risk. And all this result is after adjusting for multiple things. We adjust to the weight, we adjust for the socioeconomic status, we adjust for smoking, mental health, PTSD, a lot of factors, like 20 plus factors, and try to adjust to all of them and see if the numbers still hold. And they did. So the takeaway that sleep disorder, all of them, but specifically COMISA, which is the comorbid insomnia OSA, could be a risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes. And from a side talk, we did run the same data to see if they do increase the risk for prediabetes. And we presented that in a different meeting, and it showed the same gradient. The numbers were a little bit different, but showed the same thing. Insomnia had increased risk, then OSA, then COMISA. So basically, we’re on two studies that show the same information. So that tells us that maybe whenever we have the sleep disorder, we need to look at them more carefully because there might be a modifiable target to preventing diabetes in the future. Of course, the study doesn’t prove that, but it shows there might be a link between them.

This transcript is AI-generated. While we strive for accuracy, please verify this copy with the video.