Researchers of a new study found that teens who don't get adequate sleep at night are at a higher risk of developing acute illnesses, irrespective of being healthy or not.
Developing acute illnesses like coughs, colds, flu and gastroenteritis is quite common among young children and teens who don't have a very strong immune system. However, researchers from Bradley Hospital Sleep Research Laboratory found that there's another factor that influences how often a teen falls sick and this factor doesn't depend on whether the teen is usually healthy or not.
In a new study, researchers found that teens that don't get adequate sleep at night are more prone to developing illnesses. For the study, researchers compared three outcomes between longer and shorter sleepers: number of illness bouts, illness duration, and school absences related to illness.
"Some news reaches the general public about the long-term consequences of sleep deprivation, such as the links between less sleep and weight gain," said Kathryn Orzech, Ph.D. of the Bradley Hospital Sleep Research Laboratory in a press release. "However, most of the studies of sleep and health have been done under laboratory conditions that cannot replicate the complexities of life in the real world. Our study looked at rigorously collected sleep and illness data among adolescents who were living their normal lives and going to school across a school term."
Orzech and her team analyzed the sleep time of a few teen over a period of six weeks after an illness was reported. They found that irregular sleep timings over weekdays and weekends as well scheduling work hours late into the evenings (thus decreasing the number of sleep hours) contributed to differences in illness outcomes. Researchers noted that illness bouts decreased among both males and female when sleep durations were longer. The same held true for school absences related to illness, though in this case males reported fewer school absences related to illness bouts than females.
"We showed that there are short-term outcomes, like more acute illness among shorter-sleeping adolescents, that don't require waiting months, years or decades to show up," Orzech continued. "Yes, poor sleep is linked to increased cardiovascular disease, to high cholesterol, to obesity, to depression, etc., but for a teenager, staying healthy for the dance next week, or the game on Thursday, may be more important. This message from this study is clear: Sleep more, and more regularly, get sick less."
