Loss of Sleep Allegedly Attributed To Cancer And Other Diseases

Well, it looks like I am screwed.

In a Business Insider article titled You are probably not getting enough sleep, and it is killing you a neuroscientist from UC Berkley by the name of Matthew Walker says that lack of sleep is bad for your health.

I think it's universally acknowledged that being sleep deprived affects the quality of your life, and many of us don't get as much as sleep as we would like. But you would be surprised just how much it can affect you. Walker argues that only getting six to seven hours of sleep per night can have a negative impact and possibly even kill you in the long-run.

I am a naturally a bit of a sceptic, but what this neuroscientist is saying is quite scary:

When you haven’t slept enough, it’s harder for the body to fight off illnesses ranging from the common cold to cancer. Sleep deprivation depletes stores of your “natural killer cells,” a type of lymphocyte (white blood cell) that nix tumour and virus cells. A single 4- or 5-hour night of sleep could lower your body’s “natural killer” cell count by around 70%

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, lack of sleep has been linked to increased instances of Alzheimer’s, obesity, stroke, and diabetes.

Lack of sleep changes how insulin operates in your body and how quickly your cells absorb sugar. After a week of short sleep nights (say, five or six hours), your doctor could diagnose you with pre-diabetes. That means your blood sugar levels are elevated enough that you’re on track to become a diabetic. Long-term damage to your heart, blood vessels, and kidneys could already be in motion in such circumstances.

Sleep research is one of those areas where the effects of sleep are still being measured, we don't know the full picture yet. But one could argue that we sleep for a reason and when we go against our bodies natural impulse to sleep it could be causing damage.

In the Business Insider article they end with:

Insufficient sleep makes the body a better breeding ground for cancer. Sleepiness is now being blamed for cases of colon cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. An off-kilter sleep schedule may also give rise to cancer, since it causes melatonin to be suppressed.

And to finish this off, The World Health Organisation also makes the scary claim that night work is a "possible carcinogen" - it feels like literally everything really does give you cancer.

As someone who works in the web/IT industry and gets approximately five to six hours of sleep per night (sometimes much less) it scares me to think that the job I love is slowly killing me. And what about other jobs such as nurses, surgeons and doctors who regularly do long shifts with minimal sleep? Sometimes you have no choice.

How much sleep do you get and does this make you want to get more?

Image source Pixabay