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 Quality of Sleep and Your Health
Sufficient and quality sleep is an important indicator of good health. In fact getting enough good quantity and quality of sleep should be considered an essential component of a healthy lifestyle. Sleep and health go hand-in-hand; poor sleep affects health, and poor health has a detrimental affect on sleep. Here is a summary of recent research showing how important sleep is to your health and well-being.
A recent research study examined the relationship between cellular immune function and sleep. Researchers found that people not getting enough sleep had significantly altered immune function similar to what is found in certain disease patterns such as rheumatoid arthritis and HIV infections. The researchers also found that inadequate sleep tends to increase markers of inflammation. This is important because inflammation plays a critical role in causing coronary artery disease. In addition, inflammation is also related to respiratory disorders, diabetes, and arthritis. Finally, lack of sleep has been found to decrease the antibody response to the influenza vaccine. The researchers concluded that adequate sleep is essential for good cellular immunity and health.
Researchers studied a group of 990 people over a 5-year period in rural communities to see if lack of adequate sleep was related to weight gain. They found that body mass index (BMI) was highest for those with the shortest sleep duration (less than 6 hours per night). Individuals getting less than 6 hours of sleep per night had an average BMI of 30. As the length of sleep duration increased, BMI – even after adjusting for sex, age, educational level, physical job demands, income, depressive symptoms, marital status, and alcohol consumption. If you think depriving yourself of even one hour is not a big deal, think again. The results of this study showed that a 1-hour decrease in sleep was associated with an increase of about 3 pounds in body weight. Considering that the average young adult in the U.S. gains only about 1.1 pound per year, this is significant. Therefore, as with diet and physical activity, modest sustained changes in sleep duration could have a significant effect of weight.
The percentage of adults sleeping less than 6 hours or less per day increased significantly between 1985 and 2004, coincident with substantial increases nationwide in BMI. In addition to obesity, other studies have linked short sleep duration to increased risk for diabetes, coronary heart disease, and elevated total mortality. Sleep Duration and Health in Young Adults: A research study of 17, 465 university students across 27 different universities examined the relationship between sleep duration and health status. The following results were found among the participants:
Researchers found that men and women got similar amounts of sleep, so the groups were combined before correlating the students’ health status based on their nightly sleep amount. After adjusting for age, smoking status, physical activity, alcohol consumption, BMI, depression scores, parental education, and the use of student health services, it was found that individuals getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night had poorer health. A self-rating of poor health was 1.56 times more common in students getting 6-7 hours of sleep per night and 1.99 times more common in those getting less than 6 hours of sleep per night. It should be noted that it is unknown from this study whether the poor sleep caused poor health or the poor health resulted in poor sleep. Since the researchers adjusted for and the use of health services and physician visits to try to control for any health problems, the results seem to indicate that having poor sleep habits is a strong contributor toward poorer health - especially in young people. Lack of sleep contributes to daytime fatigue and a loss of the restorative sleep-related biological processes that are needed for good physical and mental health. It should also be noted that students getting more than 8 hours of sleep daily did not show an increase in poor health as some previous studies suggested in older adults.
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