Study: Lack of sleep may quadruple your chances of getting sick
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A UCSF-led study backs up what centuries of moms already know.
If you don’t get enough sleep, you’re more likely to get sick. Four times more likely, to be exact.
Researchers found that people who slept six hours a night or less were four times more likely to catch a cold when exposed to the virus than those who slept seven hours a night or longer.
“It didn’t matter how old people were, their stress levels, their race, education or income. It didn’t matter if they were a smoker,” said Aric Prather, assistant psychiatry professor at UCSF and lead author of the study.
The study, considered the first to use objective sleep measures to connect people’s natural sleep habits and their risk of getting sick, appeared online and in the September issue of the journal Sleep.
The results add to the growing body of evidence about the importance of sleep in health and disease prevention.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have linked poor sleep with car crashes, industrial disasters and medical errors. The National Sleep Foundation found in a 2013 survey that one in five Americans gets less than six hours of sleep before work. Prather’s previous research has shown people who sleep fewer hours are less protected against illness after receiving a vaccine.
To conduct the latest study, researchers, including those at at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, recruited 164 volunteers from the Pittsburgh area between 2007 and 2011.
The participants underwent two months of health screenings, interviews and questionnaires about their overall health. After measuring the volunteers’ normal sleep habits for a week, the researchers sequestered the sleep study group and administered the cold virus via nasal droplets. They then monitored the participants or a week to see if the virus had taken hold.