Obesity is a problem worldwide in recent times due to changing life-style altogether. It has now become a daunting task to control it in a befitting way. Health scientists, Yoga Gurus, policy makers & individuals are equally concern about this. But no concrete method is available till to-date, to control it or to prevent it suitably. Recently scientists link obesity to sleep in a great way after various experimentations.
No matter which part of the world you live in, if you do not get enough of sleep & slumber, there is ample of chance that you are going to add those extra fats in your body & thereby putting on weight. Importantly it does not matter whether you are young or old, you must sleep adequately to check obesity. The study, led by Francesco P. Cappuccio, MD, of Warwick Medical School, UK, involved an orderly search of publications on the relationship between short sleep duration & obesity risk. Out of 696 studies, the researchers shortlisted 12 studies or children & 17 studies on adults based on the inclusion criteria. This associated report of duration of sleep as exposure, Body Mass Index (BMI) as continuous outcome and prevalence of obesity as categorical outcome, number of participants, age & gender.
In children the study included 13 population samples from the 12 studies representing 30,000 participants aged between two to twenty years, and found that 07 out of 11 studies shared a significant link between short duration sleep & obesity. In case of adults, 22 population samples from the 17 studies were included that meant a total of 604,509 participants aged between 15-102 years. It was discovered that 17 population samples shared a significant association between short duration of sleep and probable obesity.
The study is particularly important as if confirms that this association of less sleep & obesity is strong and might be of public health relevance. However it also raise unanswered question yet of whether this is a cause-effect association. Only prospective longitutional studies will be able to address the outstanding questions. It is an established fact that less sleep leads to obesity in a great extent. But simultaneously extraordinarily more sleep again leads to obesity too. So one must know to balance it & have an adequate sleep to counter the much problematic obesity.