Sleep loss links to illness studied
Insomniacs know the pattern all too well. You toss and turn at night, kept awake by the rave down the street, stress from work, the snores of a significant other.
After a stretch of restless evenings, you wake up with a sore throat or a fever. You’re no longer just tired - you’re also sick.
Physicians know this pattern, too. Constant lack of sleep has long been linked with a laundry list of unpleasant conditions: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, weight gain, infectious illnesses and even death.
While it’s common knowledge that a full night of rest helps ward off ailments, what largely remains a mystery is exactly how sleep loss triggers the biological mechanisms that in turn bring about illness - like the common cold.
A 2009 study of 153 men and women, for example, showed that those who slept fewer than seven hours on average per night were about three times more likely to develop a cold than those with at least eight hours of sleep daily.
Even a small difference in sleep quality made a big difference in health, the Carnegie Mellon University study showed. Participants who actually slept less than 92 percent of the time between the time they laid down to sleep and when they woke up were 5.5 times more likely to develop a cold than those who stayed asleep 98 percent or more of the time, according to the researchers.
