According to Dr Matthew Walker from the book Why We Sleep the answer is yes.
Early warning signs of a link between sleep loss and abnormal blood sugar emerged in a series of large epidemiological studies spanning several continents.
Independent of one another, the research groups found far higher rates of type 2 diabetes amongst individuals that reported sleeping less the 6 hours a night routinely.
This remained consistent even when adjusting for other contributing factors, such as body weight, alcohol, smoking, age, gender, race, and caffeine.
However one thing that it didn't take into consideration is the individuals diet which I feel is a very important factor to leave out!
As powerful as these studies are, though, they do not inform the direction of causality.
Does the state of diabetes impair your sleep, or does the short sleep impair the body's ability to regulate blood sugar, thereby causing diabetes?
To answer this question, scientists had to conduct carefully controlled experiments with even less aggressive reduction in sleep amount.
By taking small tissue samples, or biopsies, from participants at the end, they examined how the cells of the body were operating.
After participants were restricted to 4 to 5 hours of sleep per week, the cells of these tired individuals had become far less receptive to insulin.
In this sleep-deprived state, the cells were stubbornly resisting the message from the insulin and refusing to open up their surface channels.
The cells were repelling rather than absorbing the dangerously high levels of glucose. Chronic sleep deprivation is now recognized as one of the major contributors to the escalation of type 2 diabetes throughout first world countries.
It's a preventable contribution.
PS: In the book there was no links to any of the above studies, so I am not 100% sure how accurate these studies actually are.
Coach HB