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Catch winks, not colds

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People who slept less than eight hours a night were almost three times as likely to come down with a cold as those who slept eight hours or more, according to a new study.

Quality of sleep counted even more than quantity, the study found. Those who spent as little as 25 minutes tossing and turning faced more than five times the risk of sniffling and sneezing.

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The age-old advice to get a good night’s sleep is well-supported by medical research. Just last month, a study showed that sleeping less than seven hours a night contributed to hardening of the arteries.

Earlier studies had found that serious sleep deprivation creates havoc in the immune system. But these were experimental studies that kept subjects up for most of the night, then measured their immune responses. Most of us have run those experiments on ourselves -- pulling all-nighters at college or staying up nights tending to fussy babies.

One of the surprising findings from the study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine was just how little it took to knock down defenses against the common cold.

‘Very small disruptions in sleep, very small losses in terms of duration of sleep, were associated with pretty big increases in your probability of getting sick if you’re exposed to a virus,’ said Sheldon Cohen, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and the first author of the study. ‘It’s not just insomniacs or people being deprived of sleep.’

A team of researchers interviewed 153 healthy men and women each day for 14 days, asking detailed questions about the length and quality of their sleep the previous nights. The 78 men and 75 women ranged in age from 21 to 55.

The volunteer participants were then sequestered in hotel rooms, exposed to a cold virus and observed for five days. Fifty-four of them came down with colds.

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Controlling for numerous factors that can influence health -- including age, race, income, education, exercise and depression -- the study found that the longer and better participants slept, the better able they were to resist or fight off infection.

Sleep deficiency was defined as the percentage of time a person actually slept between going to bed at night and getting up in the morning. Participants with less than 92% efficiency were 5.5 times more likely to come down with a cold than those with 98% or more efficiency.

Those annoying people who claim to get by on four hours of sleep or less?

‘My guess is that there are people who can do with less sleep,’ Cohen said. ‘Sleep efficiency is independent of duration, and that is the really powerful predictor here.’

-- Mary Engel

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