Sleep and Health

Sleep and Health - More than 14 million Americans, most over 40, have major sleep disorders-most commonly, insomnia (Nagourney, 2001). Thirty-nine percent of adults sleep less than 7 hours a night on weeknight, 36% of people over 15 report at least occasional insomnia, and 54% of people over 55 report insomnia at least once a week (Weintrauch, 2004). For women, sleep disorders may be tied to hormonal levels to related to menopause (Manber, Kuo, Cataldo, & Colrain, 2003).

Lack of sleep is Insomnia

Better sleep means better health

Enough Sleep the Body will be Fresh

It has long been known that insufficient sleep (less than 7 hours a night) affects cognitive fungtioning, mood, performance in work, and quality of life (Pressman & Orr, 1997). Any of us who has spent a sleepless night tossing and turning over some problem knows how unpleasant the following day can be. Poor sleep can be a particular problem in certain high-risk occupations, with nightmares as one of the most commons symptoms. This is especially  true for occupations such as police work, in which police officers are exposed to traumatic events (Neylen et al., 2002). 

Increasingly, we are also recoginizing the health risks of inadequate sleep (Leger, Scheuermaier, Phillip, Paillard, & Guilleminault, 2001). Cronic insomnia can compromise the ability to secrete and respond to insulin (suggesting a link between sleep and diabetes), it can increase the  risk of developing coronary heart desease (Bonner & Arand, 1998), and it can reduce the efficacy of flu shots, among its other detrimental effects (Center for the Advancement of Health, January 2004; Weintraub, 2004). More than 70.000 of the nation's annual automobile crashes are accounted for by sleepy drivers, and 1,550 of these are fatal each year. In one study of healthy older adults, sleeps disturbances predicted allcause mortality over the next 4 to 19 years of follow-up (Dew et al., 2003). Even just six nights of poor sleep in a row can impair metabolic and hormonal function, and over time, chronic sleep lost can aggravate the severity of hypertension and Type II diabetes (K. Murphy, 2000).

Sleep deprivation has a number of adverse effects on immune functioning. For example, it reduces natural killer cell activity, which may, in turn, lead to greater receptivity to infection (Irwin et al., 1994), and it leads to reduced counts of other immune cells as well (Savard, Laroche, Simard, Ivers, & Morin, 2003). Poor sleep compromises human antibody response to hepatitis A vaccination (Lange, Perras, Fehm, & Born, 2003). Shift workers, who commonly experience disordered sleep when they change from one shift to another, have a high rate of respiratory tract infections and show depressed cellular immune function, Even modest sleep disturbance seems to have these adverse effects, although after a night of good sleep, immune functioning quickly recovers (Irwin et al., 1994