Patterns: Trying to Avoid a Cold? Go Back to Bed

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: January 12, 2009

There is no cure for the common cold, but in an experiment that deliberately infected volunteers with a virus, researchers have shown that getting less sleep can substantially increase the risk of catching one.

For 14 days, the researchers monitored and recorded the sleep time of 153 healthy men and women ages 21 to 55. They also scored their sleep efficiency, the percentage of time in bed spent asleep.

Then they dripped a solution containing a rhinovirus into their noses and monitored their health for five days. Almost all subjects became infected, and more than a third had cold symptoms.

The study, led by Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University, was published Monday in The Archives of Internal Medicine.

After controlling for age, body mass index, race, smoking and other factors, researchers found that those who got less than seven hours of sleep a night were almost three times as likely to have clinical symptoms as those who got eight or more.

Those with a sleep efficiency score of 85 percent or less were more than five times as likely to be infected as those with higher efficiency.

“Even people who lost as little as 2 to 8 percent of their eight hours’ normal sleep were at four times the risk for having symptoms, “ Dr. Cohen said. “The poorer your efficiency and the less time you sleep, the more likely you are to be infected.”