Study: Sleep Found to Fend off the Common Cold

sleepGetting a good night’s rest may stop people from getting sick from exposure to the common cold virus, according to a new study.

Exposure to viruses that cause the common is inevitable. Can people do something to prevent invading viruses from turning into a full-blown case of the sniffles?

Sleep can stop a cold before it starts, according to a new study.

“Sometimes when we’re exposed to viruses, we end up not getting sick,” psychologist Aric Prather at the University of California, San Francisco told NPR.

In the study, Prather and colleagues recruited 164 healthy adults and exposed them to the common cold by giving them nasal drops that had a live rhinovirus. The researchers checked participants’ length and continuity of sleep over seven days using sleep diaries and a wrist device.

“What we found was that individuals who were sleeping the least were substantially more likely to develop a cold,” Prather told NPR. Roughly 39 percent of people sleeping five or six hours a night caught a cold. In contrast, only 18 percent of those sleeping seven or more hours got sick. Read more in the Journal.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. big chiddush there. Walk into any beis medrash and watch everyone surviving their sleep deprivation on coffee. They have been made to double as coffee shops. If you are tired- go to sleep. That is the only real solution.

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