Sleep: Timing matters just as much as quantity
A study shows that when you sleep matters just as much as the hours of sleep you get. As if getting the standard 8-hour doze wasn’t hard enough.
Researchers from the Washington State University shifted the sleep patterns of mice in their laboratory. They found out that changing sleep patterns lead to poorer quality sleep—even if they slept the same number of hours. Their immune system also got weaker.
The researchers used mice whose body clocks a 24-hour cycle – similar to humans – and housed them in a shorter 20-hour day. This forced their biological clocks out of sync with the light-dark cycle.
After 4 weeks, the researchers injected the mice with lipopolysaccharide, a molecule found in bacteria to make the mice sick but not contagious.
Disrupted sleep patterns resulted in blunted immune responses in some cases or an overactive response in others, suggesting the altered sleep cycle made them potentially less able to fight illness and more likely to get sick.
“This represents a very clear dysregulation of the system,” said Ilia Karatsoreos, an assistant professor in WSU’s Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience. “The system is not responding in the optimal manner.” Over time, he said, this could have serious consequences for an organism’s health.
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