Research now shows that sleep disruption isn’t just inconvenient and doesn’t merely affect our moods or increase risk of disease. Disrupted sleep can in fact drastically affect how well patients heal from the condition that brought them into the hospital in the first place, reports The New York Times.
Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Why We Sleep,” explored this issue in his research. “Sleep is one of the most powerful, freely available health care systems you could ever wish for,” Dr. Walker told me. “But the irony is that the one place a patient needs sleep the most is the place they’re least likely to get it: in a hospital bed on the ward.” This year, his research found that a lack of sleep can worsen pain perception.
Recently, a study in Nature found that sleep disruption is directly linked to atherosclerosis, a buildup of plaque in blood vessels. As such, it doesn’t just increase the propensity for a heart attack or stroke, but in patients admitted for a condition related to clogged arteries, interrupted sleep could actually affect how well they heal in a hospital.
A study published last year found that sleep affects wound healing, including wounds from surgery or any type of procedure. Using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index score, the researchers looked at patients with inflammatory bowel disease, such as ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. These diseases are characterized by wounds primarily in the bowel, treated most often by medications to suppress the immune system. The wounds took longer to heal among the patients who had lower sleep scores.
