Three days without sleep and a person typically cannot speak clearly or walk steadily. Add another two days and he or she is likely to be hallucinating and on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Sleep deprivation is bad, in other words, and even without being subjected to the extremes of being awake for days on end, prolonged periods of not getting the recommended 7 to 8 hours a night can lead to severe health consequences.
A team of US-based doctors and scientists found “suboptimal” sleep measured over five years can lead to a 29 per cent increase in risk of “all-cause mortality”.
Published by the American Medical Association (AMA), the research involved studying 46,000 people and highlighted the need to maintain “healthy sleep duration over time” to stay well and stave off the prospect of an early death.
The AMA research followed work published by The Journal of Immunology showing how one night of bad sleep in a healthy young adult negatively affects immune cells, suggesting that a longer-term pattern of not getting enough sleep could make a person more likely to not only suffer from inflammation but undermine the immune system.