London, June 1 (IANS): Are you gaining weight for no apparent reason? Check if you are exposing yourself to too much light while sleeping.
Sleeping with too much light in the room increases the risk of obesity in women, a new study says.
"The associations we saw in our study between light exposure at night and obesity are very intriguing," said professor Anthony Swerdlow from the Institute of Cancer Research, London.
The study involved more than 113,000 women who were followed for 40 years.
"Metabolism is affected by cyclical rhythms within the body that relate to sleeping, waking and light exposure," Swerdlow explained.
"These findings add weight to previous results from animal studies that looked into how light exposure, circadian rhythms and metabolism could all be connected in some way," Matthew Lam, a research officer with the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer, Britain.
The study appeared in the American Journal Of Epidemiology.