Health|January 14, 2010 7:30 am

Missing Sleep Bad For Your Health

Results of a new study find that catching up on missed sleep will not reverse the effect of missing key hours of down time
Boston (DbTechNo) – Results of a new study find that catching up on missed sleep will not reverse the effect of missing key hours of down time.

Many of us or of the opinion that staying up late is ok as long as we make it up the next night, but this new study finds that this is not the case.

Being sleep deprived can result in a lot of problems ranging from the inability to concentrate at work, to simply feeling fatigued during the day.

Experts state that we need at least 8 hours of sleep a night but few actually are able to meet these recommendations due to an array of reasons.

For the study, the researchers recruited 9 participants and subjected them to an array of sleep patterns.

For each hour spent awake, participants with chronic sleep loss showed deteriorating performance for each hour spent awake under the 8 hours of recommended sleep time.

“Insufficient sleep over multiple sleep-wake cycles causes performance to deteriorate much faster for every additional hour we spend awake, particularly during the biological night,” lead author Dr. Daniel Cohen of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston told Reuters.

He added that chronic sleep loss occurs when a person gets between 4 and 7 hours of sleep each night, instead of the recommended 8.

The study can be found in the journal Science Translational Medicine.


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