Deep Sleep and the Immune System You usually get tired when you're sick (and you're more likely to get sick if you don't get enough sleep). Experts believe this is because sleep starts your immune system. Research shows that you sleep more deeply when you have an infection. If you rest, you can improve faster.
In general, when adults are sick, they should try to get more sleep than 7 to 9 hours a night is recommended for healthy adults. By studying flies, researchers have identified a gene that induces drowsiness and protects against infections. Fever is usually a common symptom of some types of colds and viral infections. High fever temperatures make the body a less hospitable place for an infection to thrive.
Chills help your body maintain this higher temperature: the harder your muscles work, the warmer you will be. However, due to the normal sleep paralysis associated with the REM phase, the body normally does not tremble during REM sleep. To more effectively fight against cold viruses and infections, the body appears to actively suppress REM sleep by simultaneously fighting a cold. Each person's sleepiness response to illness will vary, which means you need to listen to your body to determine how much sleep you really need when you're sick.
Lange, who highlights the importance of sleeping at least the recommended seven or eight hours while you are sick and allowing yourself to climb from there, depending on how you feel. The infection activates the immune system and this has systemic effects on the body and therefore on sleep. The immune response not only causes increased drowsiness, but also alters the nature of sleep itself. As the immune system fights infections, the amount of time spent in REM sleep decreases, while deep sleep increases.
This makes sense, since it is during deep sleep that many restorative bodily processes take place. Improved deep sleep appears to occur as a result of processes triggered by the release of cytokines. It has been observed in animals that when faced with infection, animals that have a strong increase in deep sleep have a significantly greater chance of surviving the infection than those that do not show this response. First, cytokines, which are a type of immune system protein that targets infections, are produced and released during sleep.
ACh, acetylcholine; DA, dopamine; GABA, γ-aminobutyric acid; LC, locus coeruleus; LDT—PPT, laterodorsal tegmental nuclei and pedunculopontines; NA, norepinephrine; NREM, non-rapid eye movement; pEF, perifornica region; TMN, tuberomamillary nucleus; VTA, ventral tegmental area; W-REM in, neurons that are active both during wakefulness and during sleep with rapid eye movements. Rather, lack of sleep is understood to open the door to a wide range of diseases by weakening the body's immune system, now and in the future. Sleep interruption also appears to cause increased inflammation, which is associated with depression, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. In addition, antagonization of these cytokine systems attenuates the increase in NREM sleep following excessive food intake or sharp rise in ambient temperature34, both associated with increased production of IL-1 or TNF.
The number of these neurons immunoreactive to C-Fos correlates positively with the amount of NREM sleep during the 2 h before sacrifice, suggesting that the stained neurons were active during this phase of sleep and, therefore, could be active neurons during sleep. Truong is a Stanford-trained sleep doctor with board certifications in internal and sleep medicine. Adenosine, which is a by-product of energy metabolism, promotes sleep by inhibiting wakefulness-promoting cholinergic and non-cholinergic neurons in the basal forebrain.114.After administration of higher physiological doses of 5-HTP, an increase in NREM sleep is observed, following a delay, in both rats and mice65—67.In this view, suppressed serotonergic activity allows for the generation of REM sleep, which is consistent with observations that pharmacological inhibition of the 5-HT system improves REM sleep, while increases in synaptic availability of 5-HT inhibit it. Inflammation has also been linked to cancer, which, according to animal research, can worsen due to lack of sleep.
Consistent with the increase in NREM sleep that occurs after administration of IL-1 or TNF, antagonizing either of these cytokine systems reduces spontaneous NREM sleep. For this reason, most mechanistic studies of infection-induced sleep disturbances have used these structural components to induce the many facets of immune responses in the absence of replicating pathogens. For example, sleep apnea can cause poor quality sleep, while depression or heart disease can increase the need for sleep. .
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