Not getting enough sleep at nighttime can have a major impact on your health, a new landmark study has suggested.
According to research conducted by academics at the University of Bergen in Norway, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, sleeping for under six hours a night could lead to an increase in the risk of contracting certain infections.
The researchers concluded that people who slept for less than six hours per night were 27% more likely to have contracted an infection in the last three months when compared to those who were getting adequate sleep.
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Furthermore, it was found that if you got less than the recommended amount of sleep (seven to eight hours a night), then you were 92% more likely to have a stomach bug. Those with insomnia were found to be 41% more likely to contract a UTI.
To reach this conclusion, researchers gave medical students a survey which they asked to hand out to patients in the waiting rooms of GPs that they were on placement in.
In total 1,848 surveys were handed out. The surveys asked people various questions such as how long they slept, the quality of their sleep and their preference for when they sleep as well as their opinion on how well they think they slept.
The participants were also asked about their medical history such as if they had infections in the last three months so researchers could make the link between sleep and how susceptible a person was to infection.
“The higher risk of reporting an infection among patients who reported short or long sleep duration is not that surprising as we know that having an infection can cause both poor sleep and sleepiness,” Dr Ingeborg Forthun, corresponding author of the study, said in a statement.
“But the higher risk of an infection among those with a chronic insomnia disorder indicate that the direction of this relationship also goes in the other direction; poor sleep can make your more susceptible to an infection.”
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