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Study: A Good Night Sleep Can Even Save Lives

Study: A Good Night Sleep Can Even Save Lives

How many hours of sleep do you get in a day? You probably already know that you feel a lot better after a good night’s sleep. New study reveals that it can even save lives in the case of a major infection.

A study by some researchers from from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania reveals that sleep enhances immune system response and recovery to infection. Julie Williams who headed the research has this to say about the study:

“It’s an intuitive response to want to sleep when you get sick. These studies provide new evidence of the direct and functional effects of sleep on immune response and of the underlying mechanisms at work. The take-home message from these papers is that when you get sick, you should sleep as much as you can — we now have the data that supports this idea. Many studies have used sleep deprivation as a means to understand how sleep contributes to recovery, if it does at all, but there is surprisingly little experimental evidence that supports the notion that more sleep helps us to recover. We used a fruitfly model to answer these questions.”

Published in the online May and June edition of the Sleep Journal, were the the findings of Julie Williams and her colleague, Tzu-Hsing Kuo, PhD on two related studies to directly examine the effects of sleep on recovery from and survival after an infection.

“To our surprise they actually survived longer after the infection than the ones who were not sleep-deprived,” said Williams about the result from the first study. Result from the second study showed that “increased sleep somehow helps to facilitate the immune response by increasing resistance to infection and survival after infection.”

Sleep gives our immune systems a major boost, particularly if we are fighting off an infection.

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