Purdue Extension Weekly Update
June 5, 2026
Purdue researchers find connection between diabetes risk and sleep-related leg movements in interdisciplinary study
Diabetes affects approximately 38.4 million people in the United States, according to 2021 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers in Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences have made a recent discovery that suggests sleep may play an important role in helping predict diabetes diagnosis.
“I think our work suggests sleep health is more than the duration you sleep or the breathing metrics,” Ding said. “Sometimes we try to associate those complications with sleep apnea, but the movement pattern of your body during your sleep may also matter for your cardiometabolic risks and deserve more attention. So, if someone noticed frequent leg jerks disrupting their sleep, it’s worth discussing with a clinician, not only because it could be a symptom related to diabetes risk but also because sleep symptoms can be part of the cardiometabolic picture and could impact our overall health.”
“We found that adults reporting frequent leg jerks actually had higher odds of having diabetes,” Ding said. “The odds are 72% higher even after adjusting for a lot of the major confounders such as obesity, hypertension and sleep apnea. We also tried to explore the mechanism that could be linking leg movements during sleep and diabetes problems. We found short sleep duration and inflammation only explained a small portion of the association. So, basically, that tells us the mechanisms between leg movement and diabetes is complex and worth studying.”
Ding, who served as primary investigator on the research, became interested in this line of work after studying limb movement and diabetes risk in veterans during her doctoral work at Yale University.
“The reason why we’re studying this is because in our earlier work — we worked in a U.S. veteran cohort and with a U.S. veteran health system — we saw that a sleep phenotype that is marked by periodic limb movement in sleep was linked to later-stage diabetes risk in these veterans,” Ding said. “So, this makes us ask, does the national data show a similar signal in the general U.S. population?”
To view the full article: https://tinyurl.com/PUDiabetesSleepStudy
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