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Lack of sleep associated with increased risk for colds, respiratory infections

Adults who reported trouble sleeping or who were diagnosed with a sleep disorder were more likely to contract a cold or infection, according to data published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The findings indicate the need for more routine sleep assessment, Aric A. Prather, PhD, and Cindy W. Leung, ScD, MPH, both from the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote.

"How insufficient sleep ultimately affects disease risk remains unclear," the authors wrote. "Experimental evidence demonstrates that sleep loss can adversely affect components of the immune system critical to host resistance to infectious illness. Furthermore, short sleep duration and sleep disturbances prospectively predict increased susceptibility to upper respiratory infection after an experimental viral challenge."

Aric A. Prather

The researchers evaluated responses from 22,726 participants in the 2005 to 2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys.

Prather and Leung reported that 13.6% of participants slept for 5 hours or less each night, 23% slept for 6 hours, 56.3% slept for 7 to 8 hours and 7.1% slept for 9 hours or more. In addition, 7.1% of participants had been diagnosed with a sleep disorder and 25% told a physician about trouble sleeping.

Participants who got 5 hours or less of sleep were more likely to have a head or chest cold (OR = 1.28; 95% CI, 1.1-1.48) and infection (OR = 1.82, 95% CI, 1.42-2.34) compared with participants who got 7 to 8 hours of sleep.

Participants who had been diagnosed with a sleep disorder were more likely to have a head or chest cold (OR = 1.3; 95% CI, 1.09-1.54) and infection (OR = 2.15; 95% CI, 1.63-2.83). The researchers reported that participants who had trouble sleeping were also more likely to have a head or chest cold (OR = 1.29; 95% CI, 1.15-1.45) and infection (OR =1.73; 95% CI, 1.45-2.06).

"The cross-sectional nature of the data in our study precludes any causal inferences, and the bidirectional relationship between sleep and the immune system is well established," the authors concluded. "However, the absence of an association between long sleep and illness increases our confidence that sleep contributes to susceptibility to infectious illness rather than vice versa. This finding adds to the growing scientific literature linking sleep with physical health. It may be time that sleep assessments become more commonplace in medical settings, as sleep may serve as yet another vital sign for health." – by Chelsea Frajerman Pardes

Disclosures: Prather is a paid consultant for Posit Science on an unrelated project.