New evidence research by scientists that sleeping well may make you less vulnerable to infection.
Scientists at the University of Bergen recruited medical students working in doctors’ surgeries to hand out short questionnaires to patients, asking about sleep quality and recent infections. They found that patients who reported sleeping too little or too much were more likely also to report a recent infection, and patients who experienced chronic sleep problems were more likely to report needing antibiotics. “Most previous observational studies have looked at the association between sleep and infection in a sample of the general population,” said Dr. Ingeborg Forthun, corresponding author of the study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.
In a previous study, evidence already exists that sleep problems raise the risk of infection. Sleep disturbances are common and treatable. If a link to infection and a mechanism can be confirmed, it might make it possible to cut down on antibiotic use and protect people against infections before they happen. But experimental studies can’t reproduce real-life circumstances.
Forthun and her colleagues gave medical students a questionnaire and asked them to hand it out to patients in the waiting rooms of the general practitioners’ surgeries where the students were working. 1,848 surveys were collected across Norway.