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Lack of Sleep Puts You At Higher Risk For Colds, First Experimental Study Finds
sciencehabit writes: Moms and sleep researchers alike have stressed the importance of solid shuteye for years, especially when it comes to fighting off the common cold. Their stance is a sensible one—skimping on sleep weakens the body's natural defense system, leaving it more vulnerable to viruses. But the connection relied largely on self-reported, subjective surveys—until now (abstract). For the first time, a team of scientists reports that they have locked down the link experimentally, showing that sleep-deprived individuals are more than four times more likely to catch a cold than those who are well-rested.
anyone not know this already?.. it seems pretty obvious
Did taxpayer funds pay for this amazing revelation?
Count me in as a data point. Every time I undersleep I get the sniffles. if I undersleep and am exposed to cold weather, it's game over. Every time I oversleep after getting those sniffles I get better, if not outright lose them. I also notice that other healing processes in my body work a lot better after getting good sleep. Headaches, ear aches, all sorts of minor maladies that I've had over the years (I'm 28).
This is also one more reason to hate public schools. The early morning starts are doing the children a huge disservice by stunting their brain and body development, plus the classrooms are penning up underslept students with weakened immune systems and easily transmittable diseases. This is what you do to lab animals, not people. I've had colds on a regular basis while going to school, and I knew why. Thankfully everyone else now knows too.
is to not go outside when it's cold and you are wet. Sure way to catch one.
In studying lack of sleep, they should have more carefully studied the snotlike liquid found in the beds of people who woke up several times per night, before concluding they had colds.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Most of the colds I've encountered have made it significantly more difficult to sleep. That's actually why I'm home today - taking a rare sick day for an otherwise symtomless cold that just left me 'static-y' without letting me really sleep. No nagging mental troubles, no troubles previous nights, no cough, no caffeine or diet issues I could tell - just a steady heartbeat/mental state that wouldn't actually trigger a proper dream state all night. Had earplugs, sleeping mask, and a nice zen state to dismiss any stray distractions - just resulted in a lightly relaxed trip to dawn. Definitely seemed a physical thing rather than a physical one
I can definitely picture a virus/bacteria amongst trillions in a body focusing on this approach in order to create a niche to reproduce in. Just got to trigger/immitate one signal pathway, and boom, whole body is weakened, and the body is all too happy to play 'security theater' in order to be careful.
Ryan Fenton
I rarely get colds and I don't get a lot of sleep, last night for instance was about 5 hours, and that's pretty much normal. Did any of these propeller heads stop to think that the more time you spend sawing logs, the less time you're around other people and at risk of catching a bug?
I could have given you that information at no charge. Somewhere, there is a 1-2-3-???-4-Profit!!! list that could be built...
>>Definitely seemed a physical thing rather than a physical one.
Meant phyical rather than a mental one. I must reiterate - I am rather sleepy today - still can't get a nap going, and am now in that stage of the day where it's better to wait for night at this point. Thus, slashdot.
Ryan Fenton
Get some exercise. The sleep of a laboring man is sweet.
Interested people might want to go read up on melatonin: how it is produced most effectively, and what its effects are on health. Obviously, it is an area that still requires a lot of study to be conclusive, but I suspect that this hormone plays a large part in the effect demonstrated in this study.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
yup.
Up Next! Too much food can make you fat! Stay tuned.
Fighting the frizzies at 11.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Here is an article from 2010.
Why is this on Slashdot? A computer website...
But our mothers, wives, girlfriends, employers, etc etc etc just won't listen! We need our beauty sleep. Up at the crack of noon.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As if women needed another excuse to refuse sex.
Oh, wait...
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I love generalizations like this study. I'm a very short term sleeper. 2-4hrs/night average. Been like this my entire life (over 30yrs now). Last time I had a cold that put me in bed I was in high school. I cannot recall the last time I had one that kept me from a day of work. Last time I had the flu... I think I was 17. It's been so long it's difficult to recall now.
No doubt everything is on a bit of a curve. To say "everyone" is far to generalized.
You get sicker, and stay sick longer. Look around at all your coworkers who are pulling 80 or 100+ hour weeks. Look at what happens with a cold virus comes into the office. The managers are better in a day or two. The heavily overworked staff takes a lot longer to recover.
And sometimes they don't recover. Sometimes they die.
anyone not know this already?.. it seems pretty obvious
Pretty obvious the world is flat too, but it's helpful to use the scientific method to confirm whether or not it actually is.
Actually, it's pretty obvious that the world is round if you have some basic math. Or stand up on a westward-facing beach and watch the sun set a second time. We've known the world was round since way before Columbus, it's just that we could do the math and knew it was WAY too far around the ocean to India to make it, so nobody else was stupid enough to try. Columbus was REALLY lucky there was a landmass in the middle.
However, in my experience the connection between colds and sleep is even more obvious. The more sleep you have, the weaker the cold becomes, and vice-versa. Vary your sleep a little and you'll see it's as directly observable as "When I drop a rock on my foot, OUCH!"
Get some exercise. The sleep of a laboring man is sweet.
That's some facepalmy advice for a person with cold, especially if they have fever.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Lack of sleep puts you at risk for just about everything in the way of illness.
Go to bed, people. Don't look at any screens for at least a half-hour before you hit the pillow and it will help you fall asleep.
Sleep is wonderful. Get 8-9 hours if you can. The longer you sleep the more you'll dream and dreams (even nightmares) are crucial for good mental and physical health. In fact, some of the best days I've ever had seemed to come after a night with one of those nightmares where you wake up shouting, jumping off the bed and grasping the covers.
Artificial lighting has screwed us up a bit. If I could, I'd go to bed a few hours after dark and wake up at dawn every day. I do it during the summer, but where I live it gets dark pretty early in the winter.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I though it said "sheep".
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Everybody who goes to conventions, especially conventions for hobbies, SF, fantasy, mystery, gaming or media interests knows what con crud is. It's a type of cold or flu-like disorder that many people come down with either at those conventions or just after. Not everybody gets it, of course, and few people get it every time, but as long as there are a few people there who are in the contagious stage, it's going to be passed around. I've been lucky, so far, because in several decades of attending SF and media cons I've never come down with it. I also try to make sure that I get adequate sleep while I'm enjoying the con and that just might be why I've been immune to it. Remember, if you want to come home healthy, don't insist on partying all night, every night and be sure to eat at least one healthy meal every day.
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What does this research indicate, given the following scenario:
Two groups of people, the first group well rested, second group sleep deprived.
And I place one extra guy who is suffering from the cold already with either group separately for 1 day each
more for the pre existing conditions list and you boss can hold it over you with the GOP wins
Well bob you can keep working the OT or we can get rid you and you will have a very hard time being able to pay for a doctor ever again.
It's a well known, well studied fact that less sleep or the lack thereof reduces immunity levels. Obvious repercussion is that you can catch whatever's going around - common cold, flu, etc. Where's the news!
This would be news to Cohen, S., Doyle, W. J., Alper, C. M., Janicki-Deverts, D., & Turner, R. B. (2009). Sleep habits and susceptibility to the common cold. Archives of Internal Medicine, 169(1), 62–67. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2008.505 "Background: Sleep quality is thought to be an impor- tant predictor of immunity and, in turn, susceptibility to the common cold. This article examines whether sleep duration and efficiency in the weeks preceding viral ex- posure are associated with cold susceptibility. Methods: A total of 153 healthy men and women (age range, 21-55 years) volunteered to participate in the study. For 14 consecutive days, they reported their sleep dura- tion and sleep efficiency (percentage of time in bed ac- tually asleep) for the previous night and whether they felt rested. Average scores for each sleep variable were calculated over the 14-day baseline. Subsequently, par- ticipants were quarantined, administered nasal drops con- taining a rhinovirus, and monitored for the develop- ment of a clinical cold (infection in the presence of objective signs of illness) on the day before and for 5 days after exposure. Results: There was a graded association with average sleep duration: participants with less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.18-7.30) more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 hours or more of sleep. The association with sleep efficiency was also graded: participants with less than 92% efficiency were 5.50 times (95% CI, 2.08-14.48) more likely to develop a cold than those with 98% or more efficiency. These relation- ships could not be explained by differences in prechal- lenge virus-specific antibody titers, demographics, sea- son of the year, body mass, socioeconomic status, psychological variables, or health practices. The percent- age of days feeling rested was not associated with colds. Conclusion: Poorer sleep efficiency and shorter sleep du- ration in the weeks preceding exposure to a rhinovirus were associated with lower resistance to illness."
I didn't take care of my teeth as well as I should have when I was younger. Coincidentally, I always had minor nasal issues, especially when I first woke up. I assumed that frequently stuffy and occasional bloody noses in the morning were just parts of life. After I grew older and started aggressively taking care of my teeth, all those problems disappeared at the same time, and those nasal issues turning into colds vanished. Further, they all show up again if, for some reason, I don't take of my teeth for a night or two.
It never dawned on me that there is a moist, 100-degree Fahrenheit tube of only a few inches that any germs could travel within the 8 hours of being horizontal that could lead to such nasal infections.
I wonder whether someone who is not disciplined to get enough sleep also does not take care of his mouth.
Does lack of sleep affect that too? I noticed my body is more sensitive from them. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
But it's good advice for a healthy person.
If you sat in your office chair all day, then went home and binge watched Game of Thrones and tried to go to sleep you may not get good rest. But if you put of that last episode to go for a 30 minute jog, took a shower, then went to bed your body is much happier to get a good night's rest.
We're not meant to be sedentary creatures. That's what he was trying to say.
A sick person is supposed to get plenty of rest, however.
I refuse to sign
YMMV, but I went from 3-4 bad colds a year, to maybe one mild one every other year, when I started supplementing with vitamins C (1000mg/day), D (4800IU/day), magnesium, and zinc. I've been horribly insomniac all my life, but I still never get colds, even though I'm around children all the time, a lot of them get sick, blow their nose or puke on me, etc., and I almost *never* get their colds or GI bugs. Our own kids also stopped getting them when we started supplementing, and they're around sick kids even more than I am. I really do believe that vitamins C and D are things our immune systems need but don't usually get enough of, and that if we do get them, then getting a mild viral infection should be an exceptional circumstance, not a normal one. I'm also not discounting the value of sleep. My extreme lack thereof causes or contributes to many other health problems (depression, anxiety, lack of concentration or short-term memory, obesity, hypertension, insulin and leptin resistance, etc.). However, in spite of all this, and what I would consider generally poor health overall, I almost never get colds anymore. The supplements are cheap, and, in the quantities I take them, very unlikely to cause any other health problems. I strongly recommend them.
Nonaggression works!