Sleep, Don't Sneeze: Longer Sleep Reduces the Risk of Catching a Cold

Extract

Catching a common cold can temporarily turn everyday life into an annoying, unpleasant condition. People spend substantial efforts to avoid this state, and many of us are probably aware of the link between a running nose and a preceding period of insufficient sleep. Indeed, conventional wisdom tells us that those who are well rested are better equipped to avoid an infection. It is all the more surprising that only now, in the current issue of SLEEP, Prather and colleagues present the first solid scientific evidence that sleep makes us more resistant to the common cold.¹ They measured sleep via wrist actigraphy in 164 women and men over 7 consecutive days. Afterwards, participants received nasal drops containing a cold-inducing rhinovirus and were isolated and kept in quarantine in a local hotel. The development of a clinical cold, conceptualized as an infection in the presence of objective signs of illness, was monitored over 5 days. Infection was defined as persistence of the challenge virus or elevated virus-specific antibody titers, and signs of illness were determined each day by measuring nasal mucus production and nasal clearance time. The authors found that participants who slept 6 hours or less during the pre-infection 7-day interval had a 4-fold higher risk of developing a cold than subjects who had slept more than 7 hours per night. Of note, sleep fragmentation was unrelated to developing the cold.