REAL LIFE NEWS: SEE, I TOLD YOU SLEEPLESSNESS WAS BAD FOR YOU!
by Hazed
There are lots of ways that not getting enough sleep can affect your health, and to the list we can now add one more: it will make you more likely to catch a cold.
For years, anecdotal evidence (that is, individual stories that haven’t been tested for reality – old wives’ tales) has claimed that skimping on sleep weakens the body’s immune system, thus making it more vulnerable to colds and other viruses.
Now a team of scientists has tested this claim and found it to be true, showing that sleep-deprived people are four times as likely to catch a cold as those who are well rested.
The experiment was in two parts. First, scientists collected sleep data every night on 164 healthy individuals for 1 week. The participants recorded the times they went to bed and woke up, and wore monitors to track their movements; the researchers assumed that if they were moving about during the “sleep time” they weren’t actually asleep, so subtracted it from the hours they recorded for sleep.
In the second part of the study, scientists quarantined the participants in a hotel and gave them nose drops containing rhinovirus, which is the virus that gives you the common cold. They closed off the hotel floor for 5 days, and waited to see what happened.
To make sure the participants were not already incubating a cold at the start of the experiment, they tested their blood and removed anybody who had high levels of the protein that would indicate they had antibodies to the virus.
Once the participants had been exposed to the virus, the scientists carried out frequent tests for mucus production and congestion, as well as continuing to test the blood for antibodies that would fight the rhinovirus.
The results were clear. Of the 164 participants, 124 were given the actual virus – the rest were the control group who received non-active drops. 48 of those given the virus got sick. Checking the sleep patterns previously recorded for the sick group, the researchers reported that those who slept fewer than 5 hours a night were 4.5 times more likely to get sick than those sleeping 6-7 hours or more, with those in between 4.2 times more likely to become ill.
So it looks like the old wives were right in this case: if you want to avoid catching a cold, get a good night’s sleep.
