A good night’s sleep can fix a variety of issues, but new research suggests that getting enough shut-eye may also reduce your susceptibility to infection. Researchers at the University of Bergen enlisted the help of medical students working in doctors’ offices to distribute brief questionnaires to patients asking about recent illnesses and sleep quality. They discovered that patients with persistent sleep issues were more likely to report needing antibiotics, and patients who complained of sleeping too much or too little were more likely to also report having recently contracted an infection.
The majority of prior observational studies have examined the relationship between sleep and infection in a sample of the general population, according to Dr. Ingeborg Forthun, the study’s corresponding author. “We intended to evaluate this link among primary care patients, where we know the frequency of sleep difficulties is significantly higher than in the general population.”
There is proof that poor sleep increases the chance of infection: in a previous study, participants who were purposely exposed to the rhinovirus were less likely to develop a cold if they reported getting a good night’s sleep. If a connection to infection and a mechanism can be established, it may be possible to reduce the need of antibiotics and shield people from infections before they occur. Sleep disorders are frequent and curable. Yet, experimental investigations cannot duplicate actual conditions.
In the waiting rooms of the general practitioners’ offices where the students were working, Forthun and her colleagues gave medical students a questionnaire to distribute to patients. Almost 1,848 surveys were gathered in Norway.
The surveys asked people to describe their sleep quality -; how long they typically sleep, how well they feel they sleep, and when they prefer to sleep -; as well as whether they had had any infections or used any antibiotics in the past three months. The survey also contained a scale which identifies cases of chronic insomnia disorder.
The scientists found that patients who reported sleeping less than six hours a night were 27% more likely to report an infection, while patients sleeping more than nine hours were 44% more likely to report one. Less than six hours’ sleep, or chronic insomnia, also raised the risk that you would need an antibiotic to overcome an infection.The study design allowed for the collection of data from a sizable study group dealing with real-world circumstances, despite some bias in that people’s recall of sleep or recent health issues is not always perfect and no clinical information was collected from the doctors who subsequently saw the patients.
We don’t know why the patients went to their doctors; it’s possible that an underlying medical condition influences both the risk of inadequate sleep and the chance of infection, but we don’t think this can entirely explain our findings, according to Forthun.
