Can we die from lack of sleep?

Welcome to this edition's?Sleepletter?where we offer you easy-to-read insights from the latest research papers from the field of?sleep neurobiology?and clinical?sleep medicine. We hope you enjoy the content!

Can lack of sleep kill us?

How do you feel when you sleep poorly for only one day? I would guess tired, moody, with poor concentration, memory and low productivity. And what about not sleeping at all for one day? You’d probably feel even worse and couldn’t wait to go to bed. Well, in 1964 a man named Randy Gardner broke the world record for the longest period without sleep - 11 days and 25 minutes. I will repeat - 11 straight days without ever closing his eyes. Some reports even suggest that other people beat this record by more than a week! Even though Randy, who was 18 at the time, survived, he had some serious cognitive issues, including paranoia and hallucinations. Also, when he was asked to subtract seven repeatedly, starting with 100, he stopped at 65, saying that he had forgotten what he was doing. But, apart from cognitive deficits, he didn’t appear to have any other health consequences - at least not in the short term. Today, we know that chronic poor sleep quality increases the risk of numerous disorders, including cardiovascular, neurological, diabetes and even cancer. But, can the lack of sleep actually kill us?

A study on rats showed that sleep deprivation that lasts 2-4 weeks can kill them or bring them to a point where death seems imminent. The cause of death was, however, not clear. Using fruit fly and mouse models which share sleep characteristics with humans, a new study from Harvard Medical School uncovered how sleep deprivation actually kills animals. When looking into numerous organs of sleep-deprived animals, the researchers noticed that sleep deprivation leads to accumulation of reactive oxygen species only in the intestines, thus causing harmful gut oxidation. This process led to extremely reduced lifespan in the sleep-deprived fruit fly which lived only a third of the length of life of non-deprived flies. When researchers removed gut oxidation by feeding flies antioxidant compounds or activating antioxidant enzymes specifically in the gut, sleep deprived flies had a completely normal lifespan, thus showing a causative link between sleep deprivation-induced gut oxidation and lifespan. In the mouse, gut oxidation appeared after only 2 days of partial deprivation since the mice still slept a portion of the time, which is more realistic when it comes to poor sleep in humans. While the findings still need to be tested in humans, the study from Cell clearly shows that sleep is integral not only for health, but lifespan too. So what does this mean? Would longer sleep deprivation actually have killed Randy? We will never know, but that sort of experiment would be extremely difficult to do. Since sleep pressure arising from lack of sleep is so strong it is nearly impossible to keep a human awake for so long to have the same effects as in fruit flies which live approximately 40-60 days. Regardless, we should still take care of our body, not only to feel better the next day, but also to be healthier in the years to come.

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About the author

Alen Juginovi??is a medical doctor and?postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA studying the effect of poor sleep quality on health. He is also organizing international award-winning projects such as Nobel Laureate conferences, international congresses, concerts and other, as well as participating in many events as a speaker. Feel free to contact him via LinkedIn for any inquiries.