Lack of Sleep Connected with Diabetes?

A coworker handed me an issue of Science News with an article titled "Gene connects lack of shut-eye with diabetes". Luckily enough I was able to find it online to share in the prior link.

The cliff notes are basically that melatonin is created to make you sleep, and your pancreas has melatonin receptors so it slows insulin production when you are sleeping. This makes sense because you're about to go inactive for the next 8 hours (hopefully) and you won't need to use much energy or eat any food.

A 2007 study found that people who get less than five hours of sleep a night were significantly more likely to have type 2 diabetes. Experiments on sleep in the lab confirm this trend: Healthy young adults who were prevented from entering deep sleep for just three nights couldn’t properly regulate blood sugar levels, a 2008 study shows. What’s more, the subjects became more resistant to insulin during the study, eventually reaching the levels of insulin sensitivity that resemble the insulin resistance of diabetic people.

What does that mean for people who already have diabetes? I don't know that it helps much beyond making apparent that sleep is always important. The end of the article says they might start doing studies of people on melatonin supplements for aiding sleep. I don't think that melatonin supplements would help if you were already Type 2 diabetic though because type 2 people are already insulin resistant, they typically need more insulin, not less.