Here's another reason to cuddle up in the blanket and sleep like a baby; researches say that sleep improves the immune system and helps recover faster from infection.
Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania conducted two studies on fruit flies and found that sleep can extend life in people with severe infections.
For the first study, the researchers administered the flies with two different bacteria. The flies were divided in to two groups, sleep-deprived flies and control group. Both the groups exhibited increased sleep after infection. The researchers called it an 'acute sleep response.'
The results showed that the flies that were sleep deprived had better survival rate. The research team found that sleep deprivation made the flies rest for a longer time after infection compared to the control group. The flies slept longer and showed better survival rate after the infection. "We deprived flies of sleep after infection with the idea that if we blocked this sleep, things would get worse in terms of survival," explained Julie A Williams, Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology research associate. "Instead they got better, but not until after they had experienced more sleep."
In the second study, the researchers used the drug RU486 to regulate sleep patterns in the fruit flies. The findings showed that flies that were induced to sleep more, and for longer periods of time- up to two days before infection- showed significantly higher survival rates. These flies also recovered faster from the infections. "Again, increased sleep somehow helps to facilitate the immune response by increasing resistance to infection and survival after infection," Williams said.
"Investigators have been working on questions about sleep and immunity for more than 40 years, but by narrowing down the questions in the fly we're now in a good position to identify potentially novel genes and mechanisms that may be involved in this process that are difficult to see in higher animals," explains Williams.
"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," she said.
The research was published in the journal 'Sleep.'
