Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Health

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the effect of sleep time on the life quality. Some researches show that sleep deprivation costs the UK economy £40 billion a year, due to the reduced productivity and health. And by the recent research in 2015, it indicate that the sleep-deprived human brain has problem in both focusing and remembering. These evidences definitely show us that we need high-quality adequate sleep. So how to make our sleep more efficient had become a mystery that beset scientists for the past 20 years.

Because while the light bulb and advanced technology brought about a world of 24 hours work and productivity. It has come at a cost of our naturally biological clock and our brain’s need for sleep.The evidence shows that nurses who work more than 12.5 hours are significantly decreased vigilance, suffering an occupational injury, or making a medical error. Comparing with the normal physician, the 24-hr on-call physician has twice as many working faults during the night shift and trigger 36% more serious medical errors.

Effects of Sleep Deprivation

Last year, the scientists in Italian concluded that sleep deprivation will cause some cells to consume other parts of our brain’s synapses such as astrocytes. They are kind of star-shaped cells that able to remove worn-out cells. The result concludes that the astrocytes went into overdrive in sleep-deprived mice will cause more broken of the brain’s connections, and may lead to Alzheimer’s disease. Also, the research by Surrey University concluded that over 700 of the body’s genes, including those that govern the immune system, are altered when someone has sleep less than 6 hours.

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As a result, the weight of evidence suggests that sleep deprivation highly increase fatigue and threaten our safety. For the long-term perspective, it really has a significant effect on our health and well-being. Thus, I hope we can all have high-quality adequate sleep every day.