By Anuj Chandra, M.D., D.ABSM
According to new
research from the Netherlands, severe sleep loss causes physical effects on the
immune system that are very similar to the body's response to stress.
In a study
reported in the journal SLEEP, scientists from Erasmus MC University
Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of Surrey in Great Britain
had 15 healthy young men get plenty of sleep and abstain from caffeine, alcohol
and medications for a week. Then they made them stay awake for 29 hours and
compared how their immune systems were acting when they had plenty of rest and
when they were sleep deprived.
We cannot
consider this to be definitive, since the researchers only looked at 15 men.
But if these results are cofirmed in future research, it will have an effect on
how we treat patients in professions that typically have long-term sleep loss,
such as rotating shift work where the shift changes periodically.
This study
measured the immune system's general functioning. We should also ask: Does shift
work put people at risk for serious immune disorders? If people who have
serious immune disorders, can their condition be improved by getting enough
sleep?
Other studies have shown that
getting enough sleep helps the immune system work properly, and that losing
sleep over a long period is a major risk factor for problems with the immune
system.
