Does Sleep Affect Your Immunity?

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Written by Consensus AI
3 min read

Check out this answer from Consensus:

The collective evidence from multiple studies strongly supports the notion that sleep significantly affects immunity. Adequate sleep is essential for maintaining a robust immune system, while sleep deprivation can impair immune responses, increase susceptibility to infections, and contribute to chronic inflammatory conditions. This bidirectional relationship underscores the importance of sleep for overall health and disease prevention.

The relationship between sleep and immunity is a critical area of research, with numerous studies indicating that sleep plays a vital role in maintaining and regulating the immune system. This synthesis aims to consolidate findings from various research papers to answer the question: “Does sleep affect your immunity?”

Key Insights

  • Bidirectional Relationship Between Sleep and Immunity:
    • Sleep and the immune system are interconnected, with immune activation affecting sleep patterns and sleep influencing immune function .
  • Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Immune Function:
    • Lack of sleep weakens the immune system, increasing susceptibility to infections such as the common cold and potentially more severe diseases .
    • Sleep deprivation leads to impaired immune responses, including reduced lymphocyte proliferation and altered cytokine levels .
  • Sleep and Inflammatory Responses:
    • Sleep promotes inflammatory homeostasis, while prolonged sleep deficiency can lead to chronic low-grade inflammation, contributing to diseases like diabetes and atherosclerosis .
  • Hormonal and Cytokine Regulation:
    • Sleep influences the secretion of hormones and cytokines that are crucial for immune function, such as tumor necrosis factor and interleukin-6 .
  • Clinical Implications of Sleep Disturbance:
    • Poor sleep is associated with worsened health outcomes, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and depression, due to its impact on immune function .
  • Experimental Evidence from Animal Studies:
    • Animal studies show that sleep deprivation can lead to severe immune suppression, increased bacterial load during infections, and reduced survival rates .

 

Does sleep affect your immunity?

Raphael Vallat has answered Near Certain

An expert from University of California, Berkeley in Sleep Research, Neuroscience, Neuroimaging

This question has been extensively discussed in a recent review by Luciana Besedovsky (The sleep-immune crosstalk in health and disease, Physiol Rev, 2019). This is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic. To summarize some of the main points of the author:

Sleep does affect both our innate and adaptive immune system. Specifically, good sleep, especially non-REM slow-wave sleep, is associated with a reduced risk of infection, a better response to vaccination, and, in flies and rodents, a higher survival to infection. While the exact mechanisms are still under investigation, the beneficial effect of sleep on the immune system is likely caused by a myriad of complex hormonal changes, which only happen during sleep (specifically slow-wave sleep), and whose goal is to promote inflammatory homeostasis and immunological memory formation.

Of note, the relationship between sleep and immunity is bi-directional, such that sickness and inflammation can also alter sleep. Moderate infection tends to increase non-REM sleep duration, often at the detriment of REM sleep; an adaptive response that may in turn increase host defense and memory formation. However, extreme immune activation (e.g. severe infection) may lead to drastic disruption in sleep (both NREM and REM).

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