Sleep quality and appetite related outcomes in response to acute exercise
Creators: name: Alanazi, Turki
Publisher: name: Loughborough University
Year: 2022
Subjects: classificationCode: 429999
subject: Other health sciences not elsewhere classified

description: The prevalence of the obesity has increased rapidly and is a major concern globally. Obesity is associated with numerous health issues including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and obstructive sleep apnoea. Obesity can result from a variety of factors including energy imbalance, chronic sleep problems, and low physical activity levels. Some of these factors can be reciprocal to each other like sleep and exercise or sleep and appetite. This thesis included four experimental studies to examine sleep and appetite and the interaction between them in response to acute exercise.The first study examined the validity of sleep measurement via wrist actigraphy in comparison with polysomnography, which is the gold standard technique for assessing sleep. The sleep outcomes examined were total sleep time, actual wake time and sleep latency. The findings revealed that wrist actigraphy had a good agreement with polysomnography when assessing overall sleep outcomes. Sleep outcomes measured by actigraphy revealed an independency of measurement error with the magnitude of their respective measures. This confirms that the wrist actigraphy sleep measurement device was suitable for use in the subsequent studies within this thesis.The second experimental study in this thesis employed a robust protocol which accounts for the control trial and replicates both control and intervention trials to examine reproducibility and true interindividual variability of sleep outcomes in response to acute exercise (treadmill running). This study employed two control trials and two exercise trials. The sleep outcomes examined were total sleep time, actual wake time, sleep latency and sleep efficiency. The findings revealed that sleep outcomes are highly variable and not reproducible in response to repeated acute exercise in 20 healthy young men. Further work using a larger sample size, over a longer duration or using different populations is required to expand knowledge regarding sleep reproducibility in response to acute exercise.The third experimental study employed a randomised controlled trial design to examine the effect of an acute bout of moderate intensity exercise (cycling) on appetite, appetite-related hormones and sleep quality in 12 well-trained men. The sleep outcomes examined were total sleep time, actual wake time, sleep latency and sleep efficiency. The study revealed that acute exercise did not influence objective sleep outcomes, appetite hormones or appetite perceptions and there was no interaction between any of these factors across control and exercise trials in highly-trained men.The fourth experimental study employed a randomised control trial to investigate the acute effect of vigorous-intensity exercise (treadmill running) on objective sleep outcomes and neural responses to visual food cues using functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy men. The findings showed that acute exercise increased reactivity to food cues in the inferior frontal gyrus, paracingulate gyrus, precuneous cortex, cingulate gyrus, and precentral gyrus when accounting for baseline responses. Acute exercise transiently suppressed appetite but did not influence sleep on the subsequent night. Exercise-induced changes in sleep latency, but not appetite perceptions or other sleep outcomes, were associated with altered neural activity in the precentral gyrus in response to images of high and low energy density food. Further research is warranted to investigate this association before the implications of the findings can be established.Together, the studies within this thesis add to current knowledge on the interaction between exercise, appetite and sleep when the latter is assessed via wrist actigraphy. Moreover, this thesis shows the feasibility of using a novel design to examine the reproducibility of sleep outcomes after acute exercise. This thesis expands knowledge supporting a lack of effect of acute exercise on sleep outcomes using different protocols and different intensities. Furthermore, the studies in this thesis examined the effect of acute exercise on both central and peripheral appetite regulation providing useful insights for further study.