There is no cure for the common cold, but in an experiment that
deliberately infected volunteers with a virus, researchers have
shown that getting less sleep can substantially increase the risk of
catching one.
For 14 days, the researchers monitored and recorded the sleep
time of 153 healthy men and women ages 21 to 55. They also scored
their sleep efficiency, the percentage of time in bed spent asleep.
Then they dripped a solution containing a rhinovirus into their
noses and monitored their health for five days. Almost all subjects
became infected, and more than a third had cold symptoms.
The study, led by Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University,
was published Monday in The Archives of Internal Medicine.
Researchers found that those who got less than seven hours of
sleep a night were almost three times as likely to have clinical
symptoms as those who got eight or more. Those with a sleep
efficiency score of 85 percent or less were more than five times as
likely to be infected as those with higher efficiency.
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