Getting More Sleep Improves Your Immune System and Wards Off Infections: Study

Sleeping peacefully at night enhances your immune system and the ability to recover from infections, according to a study.

Sleep is a quintessential part of one's daily routine that not only provides rest for the brain and body, but is also known to increase life span, creativity, memory, alertness and control depression. Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that extra hours of slumbering in fruit flies increased their chances of survival and recovery from infections.

In their first study, experts injected serratia marcescens or pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria to sleep deprived and non-sleep deprived groups of fruit flies. They observed that after being infected, sleep deprived flies slept for longer durations and also lived for longer periods after recovery.

"It's an intuitive response to want to sleep when you get sick," said Julie A. Williams, study author and research associate from Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology in a news release. "We deprived flies of sleep after infection with the idea that if we blocked this sleep, things would get worse in terms of survival. Instead they got better, but not until after they had experienced more sleep."

For the recent trial, the flies were given drug that altered their sleep pattern .One group slept for two days before receiving the infections and the others were sleep deprived.  It was noted flies with more amount of sleep could eliminate bacteria of their bodies and quickly recovered from infection.

"Again, increased sleep somehow helps to facilitate the immune response by increasing resistance to infection and survival after infection" notes Williams.

The authors explained sleep deprivation increases activity of the NFkB transcription factor Relish that triggers mechanism to combat infections. Flies without these genes are likely to die from infection. Sleep deprivation before infections followed by sufficient sleep improves immune system thereby elevating the chances for recovery in fruit flies.

"These studies provide new evidence of the direct and functional effects of sleep on immune response and of the underlying mechanisms at work. The take-home message from these papers is that when you get sick, you should sleep as much as you can -- we now have the data that supports this idea," Williams added.

More information is available online in the journal Sleep.