Poor Sleep Tied to More Colds - Even in healthy people

[Cort]

<p>This study found that healthy people getting 5 hours of sleep a night were at greater risk of developing colds than people sleeping 7 hours a night. How did they figure this out? They have people a rhinovirus and then monitored their sleep for five days <img src="styles/default/xenforo/smilies_ext/wacky.png" class="mceSmilie" alt="" unselectable="on" />. I hope they paid their volunteers well.

Short sleep was more important than any other factor in predicting subjects' likelihood of catching cold," says lead author Aric Prather, assistant professor of Psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF).
"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. With all those things taken into account, statistically sleep still carried the day."

</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, another reason for improving sleep <img src="styles/default/xenforo/smilies_ext/singing.png" class="mceSmilie" alt="" unselectable="on" /> (if one was needed)</p><p><br /></p><p>Specifically, those sleeping &lt; 5 h (odds ratio [OR] = 4.50, 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.08–18.69) or sleeping between 5 to 6 h (OR = 4.24, 95% CI, 1.08–16.71) were at greater risk of developing the cold compared to those sleeping &gt; 7 h per night; those sleeping 6.01 to 7 h were at no greater risk (OR = 1.66; 95% CI 0.40–6.95). This association was independent of prechallenge antibody levels, demographics, season of the year, body mass index, psychological variables, and health practices. Sleep fragmentation was unrelated to cold susceptibility. Other sleep variables obtained using diary and actigraphy were not strong predictors of cold susceptibility.</p><p><br /></p><ul>
<li><a href="http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=30153" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=30153" rel="nofollow">http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=30153</a></li>
</ul>