and Prolonging Life (1822)
What of people? Research on humans has stopped short of the lethal sleep deprivation imposed on rats and puppies, but it has delved systematically into the consequences of a few days’ sleep loss. The results consistently show that moderate sleep deprivation has pervasive effects on the human body as well as the human mind. Sleep loss impairs vision, for example, causing blurring and errors in judging distances. It also triggers the familiar decline in body temperature that Marie de Manacéïine observed in her puppies, together with a reduction in blood glucose levels and changes in various hormones.
Set against this, sleep loss has surprisingly little impact on our ability to keep moving around and doing physical work. Moderate sleep deprivation does not greatly diminish our capacity for labour. Physically fit young adults can withstand several days of sleep deprivation without a substantial deterioration in their muscle strength, muscle endurance or cardiovascular responses to exercise. In one experiment, for example, the exercise capacity of young women was assessed following 60 hours without sleep. The sleep deprivation had no significant effect on their aerobic capacity or their endurance for exhausting exercise. In another study, researchers monitored two men while they played a marathon tennis match lasting a week, during which time the players got very little sleep. Although their mental performance deteriorated during the match, the players were able to sustain a high level of physical work. Our muscles can mostly keep going even when our brains are flagging.
Sleep deprivation does disturb many aspects of physiological functioning, however. Breathing is one example. A single night of sleep loss impairs breathing in healthy people, provoking a small but significant reduction in the maximum amount of air that can be exhaled after maximum inhalation. Sleep loss also leads to a substantial blunting of the normal respiratory responses to reduced blood-oxygen levels. After 30 hours without sleep there are marked deteriorations in the strength and endurance of the muscles used for breathing – as revealed, for example, by a reduction in the time for which people can breathe in against a sustained pressure. Such changes could be important in patients with respiratory diseases, who often suffer from chronic sleep loss. Sleep deprivation also slows the rate of cardiovascular recovery from intense exercise. When someone has been deprived of sleep for 24 hours, their breathing rate and oxygen uptake after a burst of intense exercise remain higher for longer.
Sleep loss is accompanied by many changes in body chemistry. People who have been kept awake for more than three days have altered liver functions, marked by large increases in the levels of key liver enzymes, changes in various types of fat and a rise in the amount of phosphorus circulating in the blood. Thyroid hormone levels are affected and biochemical changes can be detected at the level of gene activity.
Glucose metabolism is particularly perturbed by sleep loss. Healthy young men whose sleep was experimentally restricted to four hours a night for six nights became less tolerant to glucose. They took 40 per cent longer than normal to regulate their blood-sugar levels after eating high-carbohydrate food, and their ability to produce insulin fell by nearly a third – a condition resembling the early signs of diabetes. These abnormalities vanished after the men had slept for 12 hours. Fatigue-induced physiological changes like these could contribute to the development of chronic conditions such as diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure, all of which are associated with a shortened lifespan.
Our foster-nurse of nature is repose.
William Shakespeare, King Lear (1605–6)
Some of the most interesting, least well understood, and potentially important consequences of sleep deprivation are found within the immune system. In short, lack of sleep can impair the body’s immune defences and thereby make us more susceptible to infection by bacteria, viruses and parasites.
The evidence comes mostly from research with other species. In one experiment, for example, mice that were immunised against the influenza virus were resistant to infection if they were exposed again to the virus a week later. But if the immunised mice were deprived of sleep for seven hours immediately after being exposed to the virus, they were no more resistant to infection than mice that had not been immunised at all. A mere seven hours of sleep deprivation disturbed their immune response enough to erase the benefits of immunisation.
Some scientists have suggested that one reason why prolonged sleep deprivation is ultimately fatal is that it breaks down the animal’s immune defences, making it vulnerable to infection by any opportunistic bacteria and viruses that happen to be in the vicinity. Experiments with rats have shown that following severe sleep deprivation, the lymph nodes and other organs are invaded by potentially dangerous bacteria, which appear to have migrated there from the intestines. However, the role of infection in killing sleep-deprived animals remains a controversial issue.
Sleep loss impairs the human immune system as well. Even modest sleep deprivation evokes measurable changes. One night of sleep loss lowers the activity of natural killer cells and reduces the numbers of several different types of white blood cells circulating in the bloodstream. (Natural killer cells are a special type of lymphocyte, or white blood cell, that attack virus-infected cells and certain types of cancer cells.) Depriving healthy adults of sleep for seven hours on one night suppressed their natural killer-cell activity by 28 per cent. It bounced back to normal after a night of uninterrupted sleep. Moderate sleep loss will also reduce the body’s production of interleukin-2, a chemical messenger substance that plays an important role in regulating immune responses. After two or three days of sleep deprivation there is a marked decline in the responsiveness of lymphocytes and an even bigger fall in the activity of natural killer cells.
Sleep loss might play a role in the well-established connection between severe depression and impaired immune function. Depressed people generally sleep badly and have poorer immune responses. The more disrupted their sleep, the bigger the decline in their immune function. One study, for example, found that people who were suffering from depression following bereavement had fewer natural killer cells. The bereaved subjects were troubled by intrusive thoughts that often woke them or kept them awake during the night. The extent of the reduction in their natural killer-cell numbers was correlated with the amount of time they spent awake during the night: the more troubled someone was by their loss, the more disrupted their sleep and the fewer natural killer cells circulating in their blood. Sleep deprivation could be one of the mechanisms by which depression makes people more vulnerable to illness.
The relationship between sleep and immunity works in both directions. Not only does sleep affect the immune system, but the immune system also affects sleep. The immune reactions triggered by infection and illness can elicit alterations in sleep patterns. That is why infections are often accompanied by lethargy, loss of appetite, depressed mood and general malaise. Animals infected with influenza virus display a large increase in sleep about 24 hours after exposure to the virus. These changes in wakefulness are part of the body’s defence mechanisms and assist the recovery process. Human experiments, in which noble volunteers were injected with bacterial toxins, found that sleep is highly sensitive to the activation of the immune defences. Low-level infection tends to promote deep sleep. However, a full-blown infection accompanied by fever induces lethargy but typically disrupts sleep. You might have noticed that you sleep more deeply for a night or two when your body is fending off a potential infection, whereas when you are in the throes of a galloping illness you feel exhausted but lie for hours without sleeping.
The immune response to infection stimulates the release of chemical messenger substances that act on the brain to induce malaise, drowsiness, loss of appetite and sleep. During infection, a substance known as interleukin-1 stimulates the brain to induce deep sleep, while other interleukins trigger the fever that often accompanies infections. They do this by adjusting the brain’s temperature control centres – in effect, putting the body’s
