Can insufficient sleep increase the chance of developing a common cold?
Poor sleep is associated with susceptibility to acute infectious illness. In addition, sleep deprivation has been shown to negatively affect immune system functioning. Does this mean that you have a higher chance of getting sick when getting insufficient sleep?
This study investigated whether sleep duration affects the development of the common cold. Sleep duration was objectively measured for 7 days/nights with a sleep watch. Afterward, subjects were exposed to a virus (rhinovirus 39) to induce a common cold and isolated in a hotel for 6 days to be monitored by the study team.
Subjects with the shortest sleep duration (less than 5 hours) were most likely to develop a common cold after exposure to the virus (45% of subjects in this group). The incidence of the common cold decreased with increasing sleep duration: 30% for 5-6 hours, 23 % for 6-7 hours, and 17% for more than 7 hours.
Note that these results were statistically corrected for many other factors that are known to affect susceptibility to the common cold such as age, physical activity, and perceived stress.
These findings demonstrate that individuals who sleep more may have a lower risk of getting the common cold. However, the study was observational and cannot prove cause-and-effect. Ideally, these findings would be confirmed in an intervention study where increasing the sleep duration of an individual decreases their susceptibility to the common cold decreases.
Study:
Pranther et al. Behaviorally Assessed Sleep and Susceptibility to the Common Cold. Sleep, 2015
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