Sex Differences in Depression and Sleep Disturbance as Inter-Related Risk Factors of Diabetes

Objectives: Previous studies identified depression and sleep disturbance as risk factors for diabetes. Sleep disturbance and depression are known to be inter-related. Further, women relative to men are more prone to depression. Here, we investigated how depression and sleep disturbance may jointly influence the risk of diabetes and the effects of sex on these influences.

Methods: Using the data of 21,229 participants from the 2018 National Health Interview Survey, we performed multivariate logistic regression with diabetes diagnosis as the dependent variable, sex, self-reported frequency of weekly depression and nightly sleep duration, and their interactions with sex as independent variables, and age, race, income, body mass index and physical activity as covariates. We employed Bayesian and Akaike Information criteria to identify the best model, evaluated the accuracy of the model in predicting diabetes using receiver operating characteristic analysis, and computed the odds ratios of these risk factors.

Results: In the two best models, depression frequency and sleep hours interact with sex in determining the diagnosis of diabetes, with higher depression frequency and nightly duration of sleep longer or shorter than 7 to 8 hours associated with higher likelihood of diabetes. The two models both predicted diabetes at an accuracy (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) of 0.86. Further, these effects were stronger in men than in women at each depression and sleep level.

Conclusions: Depression and sleep inter-relatedly rather than independently contributes to diabetes. Depression and sleep hours associate with diabetes more significantly in men than in women. The current findings indicate a sex-dependent relationship between depression, sleep disturbance and diabetes risk and add to a growing body of evidence linking mental and physical health.