13/01: No Kidding?
Category: Frivolity
Posted by: A Waco Farmer
According to a Carnegie Mellon study, published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine and big news today, insufficient sleep makes on more susceptible to colds.
What would we do without these kinds of scientific breakthroughs?
What would we do without these kinds of scientific breakthroughs?
photognome wrote:
While I recognize that poking fun at "worthless" research is a time honored pastime I would ask you to reconsider the value of this type of study. Consider two points -
Do colds matter? A quick look at the cold remedy aisle in your local pharmacy, discount or grocery store will tell you that colds have an enormous impact on our economy. Understanding why we do or don't get colds is of merit on economic grounds if on no other.
Can colds tell us about the prevention of more serious conditions? The subjects in this study had an infectious agent delivered into their noses ad doses far above the minimum needed to infect them. There aren't many infectious agents you could do that with. Studying the body's response to this type of virus may be the only way to give a real world (in vivo) test of immune system response.
Back to the study itself. As might be expected the popular press version differs in significant ways from the study itself. There was no difference in whether the subjects were infected with the virus; there were differences in how sick they got from this infection.
How long the subjects reported sleeping per night was not a very good predictor of how sick they got. The real predictor was poor "sleep efficiency" (the more time they spent in bed intending to sleep but being in fact awake).
When sleep duration was looked at there are a couple of interesting findings. The increased risk of getting sick from a cold virus infection happened in subjects with sleep duration within the 'recommended amount of sleep'. More interesting a deficit of 10-38 minutes sleep per night resulted in 4 times the risk of getting sick.
While it might be "common sense" that not getting enough sleep makes you more likely to 'catch o cold' would you expect 4 times the risk from sleeping 15-20 minutes less a night over a two week period?
Many of the reports on sleep and health (including this one) can come across as telling us we need to sleep more. In this study the major risk (about 6 times the risk of getting sick) was related to not being able to sleep when in bed intending to sleep. It wasn't that the subjects slept less because of choosing to stay up of choosing to get up earlier.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this study.