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 “In many countries, particularly western countries, sleep takes a
back seat to productivity, which may make some sense in the short
term but certainly not the longer term,” said coauthor Aric A.
Prather of the Center for Health and Community at the University of
California, San Francisco. “Sleep happens with whatever time is left
after all of the other ‘necessary’ tasks are attended to.”
Getting too little sleep can have a direct impact on cardiovascular,
endocrine and immune functioning that may increase disease risk over
time, Prather told Reuters Health by email.
In addition, “poor sleep may lead to health behaviors that also
raise one’s risk for poor heath,” he said. “Short sleepers are less
likely to exercise and more likely to engage in less than ideal
nutrition that, again over time, can affect health.”
The researchers used responses from more than 22,000 adults in the
National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys between 2005 and
2012. The participants reported their typical weekday hours of
sleep, history of diagnosed sleep disorders and whether they had
ever told a doctor about having trouble sleeping.
They also answered questions about having a head or chest cold, the
flu, pneumonia, or an ear infection over the previous 30 days.
Almost 14 percent of people said they slept no more than five hours
per night, 23 percent slept for six hours, 56 percent slept for
seven to eight hours, and 7 percent said they slept for nine or more
hours per night.
One quarter had told a doctor about trouble sleeping and 7 percent
had been diagnosed with a sleep disorder.
Over the previous 30 days, 19 percent of ‘short sleepers’- that is,
those with five or fewer hours of sleep per night - had a head or
chest cold, compared to 16 percent of those who slept for six hours
and 15 percent of those who got seven or more hours.
After accounting for factors like age, sex, race, education level
and smoking status, those with a diagnosed sleep disorder were also
more likely to have had a cold or infection than others, the
researchers reported April 11 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
“This data does not allow us to know whether sleep causes an
increase in susceptibility to respiratory infections,” only that the
two are somehow connected, Prather said.
But in a 2015 study, he and his team experimentally exposed people
to the cold virus after assessing their typical sleep, and those who
slept six or fewer hours were roughly four times more likely to
develop a biologically-verified cold than those who slept more than
seven hours, he said.
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“It is our hope that this work will help raise the profile of sleep
as a critical health behavior that should be considered as an
additional vital sign for optimal health,” he said.
“Very little if any training about sleep happens in medical school
so most physicians do not know anything about sleep,” said Dr.
Sanjay R. Patel of the Center for Sleep and Cardiovascular Outcomes
at the University of Pittsburgh. “As a result, they do not feel
comfortable talking about sleep with their patients.”
“Similarly, society does not stigmatize the person getting in their
car and driving after only four hours of sleep the way it does the
person driving after drinking, even though the risk to others on the
road may be the same,” Patel told Reuters Health by email.
Chronic poor sleep increases the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart
disease, he said.
“Sleep deprivation studies in the laboratory have clear effects on
immune function, and other clinical studies have shown that poor
sleep before exposure to the cold virus influences the risk of
actually developing a cold,” said Dr. Daniel J. Buysse of the
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who was also not part
of the new research.
“Like most things, it’s a complicated story, but sleep is likely to
play an important role,” he told Reuters Health by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1SJtqe5
JAMA Intern Med 2016.
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