Marie-Pierre St-Onge

Columbia University | CU · Department of Medicine

Background This study examines the associations between device-measured sleep regularity and the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE), and aims to determine whether sufficient sleep duration attenuates or eliminates the effects of irregular sleep on MACE risk. Methods A prospective cohort study of adults aged 40–79 years from the UK...

Introduction: Poor sleep is associated with adverse mental and cardiometabolic health outcomes. However, there are limited data on the interplay between insomnia and psychological distress domains and their influence on adiposity indicators among women. Aims: To evaluate associations of psychological distress domains with adiposity indicators and e...

Sleep is integral to cardiovascular health1,2. Yet, the circuits that connect cardiovascular pathology and sleep are incompletely understood. It remains unclear whether cardiac injury influences sleep and whether sleep-mediated neural outputs contribute to heart healing and inflammation. Here we report that in humans and mice, monocytes are activel...

Objective The objective of this study was to examine the changes in adipose tissue lipolytic capacity and insulin signaling in response to shortened sleep duration (SSD) in postmenopausal women. Methods Adipose tissue from a randomized crossover study of nine healthy postmenopausal women (mean [SD], age: 59 [4] years; BMI: 28.0 [2.6] kg/m ² ) expo...

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute convened a virtual workshop in September 2022 to discuss “Optimal Instruments for Measurement of Diet, Physical Activity, and Sleep.” This report summarizes the proceedings, identifying current research gaps and future directions for measuring different lifestyle behaviors in adult population‐based stud...

OBJECTIVE To prospectively examine the association between device-measured sleep regularity and incidence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in a population-based sample of adults. We also examined if meeting sleep duration recommendations attenuated or eliminated the effects of irregular sleep on T2D. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We conducted a prospective...

Chrononutrition is a rapidly evolving field of nutritional epidemiology that addresses the complex relationship between temporal eating patterns, circadian rhythms, and metabolic health, but most prior research has focused on the cardiometabolic consequences of time-restricted feeding and intermittent fasting. The purpose of this topical review is...

An emerging field of research has revealed a bidirectional relationship between sleep and diet, highlighting the potential role of a healthy diet in improving sleep. However, the impact of chrono-nutrition on sleep remains less explored. Here we conducted a systematic scoping review, considering the multiple dimensions of chrono-nutrition, to descr...

This observational pilot study examined the association between diet, meal pattern and glucose over a 2-week period under free-living conditions in 26 adults with dysglycemia (D-GLYC) and 14 with normoglycemia (N-GLYC). We hypothesized that a prolonged eating window and late eating occasions (EOs), along with a higher dietary carbohydrate intake, w...

GDF15 (growth differentiation factor 15) is a marker of cellular and mitochondrial energetic stress linked to physical-mental illness, aging, and mortality. Here, we describe the psychobiological regulation of plasma and saliva GDF15 in four human studies including 3,599 samples from 148 healthy individuals. We report two main observations establis...

Introduction Postpartum weight retention (PPWR), defined as ≥5kg difference between pre-pregnancy and 12-month postpartum weights, is associated with sustained weight retention across the life course. Maternal insufficient sleep duration is associated with PPWR. However, few studies have measured sleep objectively and other potentially relevant sle...

Introduction The “Mind After Midnight" hypothesis suggests that being awake at night is associated with cognitive/affective dysregulation and impaired decision-making. Previous work identified risks associated with suicide. The present study examined whether nocturnal wakefulness is associated with aberrant food intake. Methods Data were extracted...

Introduction Chronic insufficient sleep contributes to the development of obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D). However, the physiologic underpinnings of these effects are incompletely understood. There is some evidence that sleep restriction (SR) adversely affects thyroid hormones and growth factors involved in energy metabolism, but findings are mix...

Introduction: Short sleep duration is associated with increased cardiometabolic risk. DNA methylation plays a critical role in the regulation of gene expression and studies suggest that sleep deprivation may alter DNA-methylation patterns. However, most findings are from acute sleep deprivation or short duration studies. Hypothesis: Prolonged sleep...

Introduction: Circadian rhythms regulate key physiological processes, including sleep-wake. Alterations in the circadian rhythm have been associated with greater risk of metabolic diseases. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have revealed genes variants associated with sleep phenotypes. Hypothesis: Polygenic risk scores (PRS) for significant SN...

BACKGROUND The American Heart Association (AHA), in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, annually reports the most up-to-date statistics related to heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular risk factors, including core health behaviors (smoking, physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and obesity) and health factors (cholesterol, blood...

Background Older adults with obesity (body mass index [BMI] ≥30 kg/m ² ) and type‐2 diabetes (T2D) have increased risks for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia. Sleep‐disordered breathing (SDB) is common in older adults and those with T2D and obesity, and has been linked to increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Alzheimer’s disease...

Older adults with obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are at elevated risk for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia. Compared with younger persons, older adults are more likely to have sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), which is also common among adults with T2D and obesity and is associated with higher risk of dementia. The Look AHEAD Sleep (...

OBJECTIVE Insufficient sleep is associated with type 2 diabetes, yet the causal impact of chronic insufficient sleep on glucose metabolism in women is unknown. We investigated whether prolonged mild sleep restriction (SR), resembling real-world short sleep, impairs glucose metabolism in women. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Women (aged 20–75 years) w...

Background Insufficient sleep is associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk, but causality is unclear. We investigated the impact of prolonged mild sleep restriction (SR) on lipid and inflammatory profiles. Methods and Results Seventy‐eight participants (56 women [12 postmenopausal]; age, 34.3±12.5 years; body mass index, 25.8±3.5 kg/m...

Sleep restriction is associated with increased cardiovascular risk, which is more pronounced in female than male persons. We reported recently first causal evidence that mild, prolonged sleep restriction mimicking “real-life” conditions impairs endothelial function, a key step in the development and progression of cardiovascular disease, in healthy...

Mitochondria are key energy transforming organelles in mammalian cells. However, how defects in oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos) and other mitochondrial functions influence whole-body energy expenditure (EE) has not been rigorously studied. Cellular and organismal responses to OxPhos defects likely involve a combination of functional downregulati...

Polyphenols are plant compounds with several biological activities. This review aims to summarize current knowledge on the potential role of polyphenols in modulating sleep. A total of 28 preclinical studies, 12 intervention studies and four observational studies exploring the role of polyphenol intake on sleep were identified. From animal studies,...

Purpose of Review We summarized research on the bidirectional association between intake of ultra-processed food (UPF) and sleep. Recent Findings Sleep contributes to cardiometabolic health in part via food intake patterns. Restricting sleep increases intakes of high-carbohydrate/high-fat foods, a profile representative of UPF. Summary This syste...

Study objectives: Insufficient sleep leads to overconsumption, but the factors contributing to this effect are poorly understood. Therefore, we assessed the influence of prolonged curtailment of sleep on free-living eating patterns linked with overconsumption and explored associations of these eating patterns with diet quality under different slee...

Background: Daytime sleepiness is common in older adults and may result from poor nighttime sleep due to sleep disordered breathing, fragmented sleep, or other sleep disorders. Daytime sleepiness may be associated with cognition in older adults. Objectives: We investigated the association between self-reported daytime sleepiness and cognitive fu...

Objectives: This pilot randomized controlled study evaluates the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of a 7-week remote intervention combining well-being therapy and sleep hygiene to improve sleep and psychological outcomes among adults reporting poor sleep and distress. Methods: Thirty-one participants (81% women, 40.2 ± 13.0 y, 48% racial/eth...

Obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are increasingly common worldwide. While these disorders have increased in prevalence over the past several decades, there has been a concomitant reduction in sleep duration. Short sleep duration has been associated with higher rates of obesity and T2D, and the causality of these associations and their directionali...

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of sleep restriction (SR) on insulin sensitivity and energy metabolism in postmenopausal women. Methods: In a randomized crossover trial, 14 women underwent four nights of habitual sleep (HS, 100% normal sleep) and SR (60% of HS) while following a eucaloric diet. Outcomes included th...

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence and severity of sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) across racial/ethnic groups in 3702 pregnant people at 6 to 15 and 22 to 31 weeks gestational age, examine whether BMI modifies the association between race/ethnicity and SDB, and investigate whether interventions to reduce weight might r...

Introduction: Population studies show an association between higher quality diets and better sleep quality. Some clinical intervention studies have supported an influence of diet on sleep but have primarily examined specific foods and not complete dietary patterns. In a previous study, we showed that higher intakes of fiber and lower intakes of sug...

Introduction: Psychological distress has been linked to obesity through its impact on health behaviors, including sleep, while resilience has shown a protective effect on health. However, limited evidence is available on the role of sleep and resilience on the association between psychological distress and obesity, especially among women. Hypothesi...

Introduction: Obesity and sleep problems are risk factors for various health problems. Children with both obesity and sleep problems are more likely than children with only one condition to develop cardiometabolic disorders later in life. This study estimates the prevalence of children with obesity and insufficient sleep duration and examines relat...

Study Objectives Poor sleep in adolescents can increase the risk of obesity, possibly due to changes in dietary patterns. Prior neuroimaging evidence, mostly in adults, suggests that lacking sleep results in increased response to food cues in reward processing brain regions. Needed is clarification of the mechanisms by which food reward processing...

Poor sleep quality and insufficient sleep affect a large portion of the population. This is concerning given increasing evidence that poor sleep health is a behavioral risk factor for the development of cardiometabolic diseases. A healthy diet is associated with a plethora of favorable health outcomes, and emerging research now highlights diet as a...

Circadian rhythms regulate the sleep–wake and feeding–fasting cycles. Sleep and feeding constitute a complex cycle that is determined by several factors. Despite the importance of sleep duration and mealtimes for many obesity phenotypes, most studies on dietary patterns have not investigated the contribution of these variables to the phenotypes ana...

Background: The American Heart Association, in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health, annually reports the most up-to-date statistics related to heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular risk factors, including core health behaviors (smoking, physical activity, diet, and weight) and health factors (cholesterol, blood pressure, and glu...

Patients with primary mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos) defects present with fatigue and multi-system disorders, are often lean, and die prematurely, but the mechanistic basis for this clinical picture remains unclear. By integrating data from 17 cohorts of patients with mitochondrial diseases (n = 690) we find evidence that these di...

Background: Daily rhythms are observed in humans and almost all other organisms. Most of these observed rhythms reflect both underlying endogenous circadian rhythms and evoked responses from behaviours such as sleep/wake, eating/fasting, rest/activity, posture changes and exercise. For many research and clinical purposes, it is important to unders...

Background: There are bi-directional relationships between sleep disturbances and obesity, both of which are prevalent in patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). However, little is known about the sleep-obesity association in HFpEF. Objectives: To determine associations of multidimensional sleep health, night moveme...

Healthy individuals exhibit blood pressure variation over a 24-hour period with higher blood pressure during wakefulness and lower blood pressure during sleep. Loss or disruption of the blood pressure circadian rhythm has been linked to adverse health outcomes, for example, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and chronic kidney disease. However, the...

Introduction: Individual behaviors in the 24h rest-activity cycle have been linked to cardiometabolic health (CMH). Studies that integrate the overall multidimensional pattern of 24-h rest-activity rhythms (RAR) and evaluate its unique relation with CMH and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are limited. Hypothesis: Disrupted RAR are associated with poorer glyc...

Ultra-processed foods (UPF) are ubiquitous in the modern-day food supply and widely consumed. High consumption of these foods has been suggested to contribute to the development of obesity in adults. The purpose of this review is to present and evaluate current literature on the relationship between UPF consumption and adult obesity. Cross-sectiona...

Background Although sufficient and healthy sleep is inversely associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and its risk factors, the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 (LS7), as a measure of cardiovascular health (CVH), did not include sleep. We evaluated an expanded measure of CVH that includes sleep as an eighth metric in relation to CV...

Objective: This study investigated the effects of circadian misalignment (CM), induced by delaying mealtimes, independent of sleep timing and duration and eating window duration, on energy expenditure (EE), respiratory quotient (RQ), and substrate oxidation. Methods: Healthy adults, aged 20 to 49 years, participated in this randomized crossover...

A sleepless night may feel awful in its aftermath, but sleep’s revitalizing powers are substantial, perpetuating the idea that convalescent sleep is a consequence-free physiological reset. Although recent studies have shown that catch-up sleep insufficiently neutralizes the negative effects of sleep debt, the mechanisms that control prolonged effec...

Background The timing and regularity of eating patterns could play a role in systemic inflammation, as circadian clocks responsible for daily rhythms of inflammatory signaling are entrained by food intake. Purpose To evaluate associations of intra-weekly and weekday-weekend differences in eating timing patterns with high-sensitivity C-reactive pro...

Introduction Psychological distress has been associated with sleep problems. Emerging evidence suggests positive psychological well-being is associated with better sleep. However, most of these studies are cross-sectional and do not provide information on the effect that changes in psychological outcomes have on sleep. The aim of this secondary ana...

Background: Eating behavior is an important construct with predictive value for energy intake and is associated with health. Two characteristics of eating behavior, eating window and eating frequency, are consistently associated with cardiometabolic risk across populations and have been shown to be related to sleep patterns. Both lifestyle factors...

Introduction: Short sleep duration is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Dyslipidemia is one of the main risk factors for CVD but the influence of sleep duration on this risk factor is, for the moment, inconclusive. Objective: The goal of this study is to test the impact of mild sleep restriction (SR), sustained for...

Introduction: The Covid-19 pandemic had a negative impact on mental health and lifestyle behaviors, including dietary habits. Negative psychological factors are known to adversely impact lifestyle behaviors, but the influence of positive psychological well-being on dietary intakes is relatively unknown. Hypothesis: We assessed the hypothesis that p...

Background: Circadian misalignment (CM), the mismatch between timing of behaviors and internal body clock, increases cardiometabolic risk, but the mechanisms are not fully understood. Population studies in night shift workers and intervention studies attempting to replicate CM have often been confounded by differences in energy intake, sleep durati...

Insufficient sleep is highly prevalent in society and has tremendous negative health consequences. Despite the available treatments, there is continued demand for novel and natural strategies to promote better sleep. Dietary modifications could be a viable new target to improve sleep. A literature review using PubMed was conducted on studies that e...

Short sleep is a prevalent behavior across all strata of the population [1], adolescents included [2]. Many meta-analyses have reported associations of short sleep with obesity in both adults [3] and children [3–7]. Most recently, Bacaro et al. [8] confirmed in longitudinal studies that adults who report sleeping <6 h/night are at heightened risk f...

Aging is a risk factor for several pathologies, restricting one’s health span, and promoting chronic diseases (e.g., cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases), as well as cancer. Telomeres are regions of repetitive DNA located at chromosomal ends. Telomere length has been inversely associated with chronological age and has been considered, for...

Objectives This brief narrative review aims to give an up-to-date overview of intuitive and mindful eating (I/ME) interventions with specific focus on cardiometabolic risk factors, including glucose, lipid profile, blood pressure and inflammatory markers. Content I/ME intervention studies in adults which measured at least one physiological paramet...

Background Daytime sleepiness is common in older adults and may result from poor nighttime sleep due to sleep disordered breathing, fragmented sleep, or other sleep disorders. Daytime sleepiness may signify disruption of circadian rhythms and disorder in neural circuitry arising from neurodegenerative disease. We investigated the association betwee...

Introduction: Sleep disorders are associated with heart failure. The association of cardiac dysfunction with abnormalities in sleep have not been clearly elucidated. We examined the association of cardiac structure and function on echo with sleep patterns in participants with stable heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). Hypothesis...

Background Sleep variability and social jetlag are associated with adverse cardiometabolic outcomes via circadian disruption. Variable eating patterns also lead to circadian disruption, but associations with cardiometabolic health are unknown. Methods and Results Women (n=115, mean age: 33±12 years) completed a 1‐week food record using the Automat...

Two factors intrinsic to health are diet and sleep. These two behaviors may well influence one another. Indeed, that insufficient sleep adversely impacts dietary intakes is well documented. On the other hand, diet may influence sleep via melatonin and its biosynthesis from tryptophan. Experimental data exist indicating that provision of specific fo...

The human circadian system consists of the master clock in the suprachiasmatic nuclei of the hypothalamus as well as in peripheral molecular clocks located in organs throughout the body. This system plays a major role in the temporal organization of biological and physiological processes, such as body temperature, blood pressure, hormone secretion,...