CHICAGO — Fluff up the pillows and pull up the covers. Preventing the common cold may be as easy as getting more sleep.
Researchers paid healthy adults $800 to have cold viruses sprayed up their noses, then wait five days in a hotel to see if they got sick. Habitual eight-hour sleepers were much less likely to get sick than those who slept less than seven hours or slept fitfully.
“The longer you sleep, the better off you are, the less susceptible you are to colds,” said lead author Sheldon Cohen, who studies the effects of stress on health at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University.
During cold season, staying out of range of sneezing relatives and co-workers may be impossible. The study, appearing Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, mimicked those conditions by exposing participants to a common cold virus, rhinovirus.
After five days, the virus had done its work, infecting 135 of the 153 volunteers. But only 54 people got sick.
The people who slept less than seven hours a night in the weeks before they were exposed to the virus were three times more likely to catch a cold than those who slept eight hours or more.
Those who tossed and turned more than 8 percent of their time in bed were five times more likely to get sick than those who were sleepless only 2 percent of the time.
Cold symptoms such as congestion and sore throat are caused by the body’s fight against a virus, rather than the virus itself, Cohen said. People whose bodies make the perfect amount of infection-fighting proteins called cytokines will not even know they are fighting a virus. But if their bodies make too many, they feel sick.
Sleep may fine-tune the body’s immune response, Cohen said, helping regulate the perfect response.
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