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Study links sleep to immunity system host defense

While it has been believed that sleep enables recovery from illness or infection and lack of sleep increases the chance of health problems, most of that has been anecdotal rather than the result of scientific study.

“In terms of the lack of sleep and host defense, there’s relatively little evidence,” said Linda Toth of Southern Illinois University.

At the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology meeting February 23-27 at the San Diego Convention Center, Toth presented research titled “The Importance of Sleep in Host Defense” during a March 27 workshop focusing on sleep and host response. She noted that part of the lack of scientific research is due to the difficulty in inducing continued total sleep loss.

Toth’s solutions included tethering rodents to a computer, which rotates a disk when sleep is detected. “They develop progressive debilitation,” Toth said of the sleep-deprived rodents.

Eventual symptoms include hypothermia, septicemia (blood poisoning), and death. In the case of rodents, the process to death takes approximately three weeks.

Another experiment involved comparison of mice with differently regulated macrophage genes, allowing researchers to determine changes correlating with sleep patterns. “The poor sleep correlated to a poor prognosis,” Toth said.

Toth believes that sleep may contribute to regulated responses to illness or infection. “Poor sleep may reflect an excessive or unregulated response,” she said. “This corresponds to inflammatory disease, disability, and death.”

 

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