Jan 19, 2016 04:41 AM EST By Rashmi Kalia, UniversityHerald Reporter

A new study reveals that "catch-up" sleep might reverse that risk of diabetes that is tied to sleep deprivation, nwitimes reports.

The study findings were published online Jan. 18 in Diabetes Care.

Previous research has suggested that getting just four or five hours of sleep a night can boost the risk of type 2 diabetes by nearly 20 percent.

The new study suggests that that risk might be reversed with just two days of extra sleep.

"I have to say that this is a small, very short-term controlled study involving only healthy men," said study lead author Josiane Broussard, an assistant research professor with the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

"In real life, you'd be losing sleep week in and week out, so we don't know whether catch-up sleep can give you this kind of risk improvement in that context. But the good take-away from this work is that at least in terms of diabetes risk, it seems that you're not necessarily totally screwed if you experience sleep loss," said Broussard.

For the study, the researchers allowed 19 healthy, young and lean men up to 8.5 hours of sleep per night for four consecutive nights in a sleep lab. The four-day "normal" sleep period was followed by a glucose tolerance test. The same group was then allowed to sleep just 4.5 hours a night for four consecutive nights. After the four nights, they had another glucose tolerance test. After that, the men were given two days of "recovery" sleep. This sleep was again followed by glucose testing.

The results showed that the men had a 23 percent drop in insulin sensitivity compared to normal levels after four days of too little sleep. There was also a 16 percent drop in a key diabetes risk measure called the "disposition index" after the sleep restriction.

However, after two days of recovery sleep, both the insulin sensitivity levels and the disposition index rebounded.

"Whether a pre-diabetic or overweight person would improve is really not known," cautioned Broussard.

"And while I would hypothesize that women -- who also have impairments when sleep-deprived -- would also improve, there could be a difference in the degree of their improvement. So really this study raises many more questions than we answer."

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