Are You Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired?

Don’t you hate that time of year when it seems like the entire campus is sick? So do I! I mean you’re just sitting in class minding your own business trying to get your education and BAM, you are bombarded with coughs and sneezes from every direction while you try all you can to protect yourself. You down a couple of vitamin C gummies (yes gummies I prefer them to the tablets) or maybe some Airborne, but sooner or later you are betrayed by your body and you wonder “Why me?”. Well let’s see, you thought you did everything you could do right, you have your gummies, your Airborne, even your recently acquired stockpile of OJ but you still ended up sick. Well as Dr. Scullin would point out, “How much sleep did you get?”

In the article Common Cold they set out to see if measured sleep behavior could be predictors in participant susceptibility to the common cold. Data was collected over a span of 4 years and included 164 participants with ages ranging from 18-55. The participants went through various medical screenings as well as interviews and questionnaires to assess emotion, they also wore and Actigraphy watch to monitor sleep behavior. The participants were given nasal drops which contained the virus (rhinovirus) and then quarantined for 5 days (participants were compensated $1,000), each day they had to do a nasal lavage, and a nasal mucociliary clearance function to test for infection. The experimenters also measured sleep behavior by total sleep time and fragmentation index.

The experimenters concluded that a threshold effect of <6 hours of sleep resulted in a higher risk of obtaining the cold, demonstrating that a shorter duration of sleep does in fact result in increased rates of cold development. They also found that the various covariates they screened for previously as well as fragmentation did not significantly contribute to risk rates.

Personally the very first thing I thought when reading the intro was “I hope these people were paid handsomely for willingly being infected with a virus” like come on I hate being sick so I am glad they got something out of this. I also thought it was interesting that there might be a correlation between longer duration of sleep (>9 hours) and disease, I think I would like to know more about that. This study definitely reinforces that no matter how well you try to take care of your body if you aren't getting the proper amount of sleep your efforts are ultimately futile.

The public would definitely benefit from this article because we all get super busy during certain times of the year and we forget to take care of ourselves and having this information can just be a reminder that during the times where you know you’re the busiest or it’s a time where you’re more likely to get sick you can stop and ask yourself “Am I getting enough sleep?”