Journal: BMC medicine
This study examined how unhealthy sleep and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) influence each other and explored circulating protein markers that might explain this relationship.
Using data from 381,228 UK Biobank participants, the authors defined an “unhealthy sleep” pattern and related it to both existing (prevalent) IBD and new-onset (incident) IBD. After adjustment for confounders, unhealthy sleep was associated with:
- Higher odds of having IBD at baseline (OR 1.25, 95% CI 1.17–1.34)
- Increased risk of developing IBD during follow-up (HR 1.24, 95% CI 1.14–1.35)
In a subset of 40,392 participants with plasma proteomic data, 182 proteins were differentially expressed in both unhealthy sleep and IBD. Network analysis clustered these proteins into modules enriched for pathways related to immune cell activation, chemotaxis, and amino acid/organic acid metabolism, suggesting overlapping inflammatory and metabolic mechanisms.
Using LASSO-Cox regression, the authors built a proteomic risk model for IBD that achieved an AUC of 0.81 for predicting IBD onset within 2 years. Individuals with both unhealthy sleep and a high proteomic risk score had a substantially increased risk of incident IBD (HR 3.37, 95% CI 2.30–4.94).
Overall, the work supports a bidirectional link between sleep disturbance and IBD, mediated by inflammatory and metabolic pathways, and proposes proteomic markers that may help identify high-risk patients and inform more integrated management that includes sleep assessment.