Lack of sleep linked to coughs
Updated on 13 January 2009
Too little sleep can lead to coughs and sneezes, new research suggests.
People who get less than seven hours of sleep a night are three times more likely to develop cold symptoms than those who spend eight hours or more asleep, scientists found.
However, sleep did not affect a person's chances of catching a cold.
Effects of poor sleep on the immune system are thought to explain the findings.
A team led by Dr Sheldon Cohen, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US, studied 153 healthy men and women who described their sleep patterns over a two-week period. They were then given nasal drops containing the common cold-causing rhinovirus.
For five days afterwards, the volunteers noted any signs or symptoms of illness and provided mucus samples from their nasal passages. After a month, they submitted blood samples that were tested for immune responses to the virus.
The researchers found the less an individual slept, the more likely he or she was to develop a cold.
Waking up in the night was also associated with cold symptoms. Participants who spent less than 92% of their time in bed asleep were five-and-a-half times more likely to become ill than those whose sleep efficiency was 98% or more.
The authors wrote in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine: "A possible explanation for this finding is that sleep disturbance influences the regulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, histamines and other symptom mediators that are released in response to infection."
Cytokines and histamines are both chemicals released by cells as part of the body's immune response.
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