To gauge how often sleep troubles persist, researchers surveyed more than 650 long COVID patients who visited the Cleveland Clinic’s reCOVer Clinic between February 2021 and April 2022. Why sleep problems continue after COVID infectionįor many people, sleep troubles don’t end on Day 10 or when a person tests negative. The physiological drive to sleep more while getting sick might be adaptive-helping the body fight off the invader, Axelsson says. Anecdotally, that’s the same pattern reported by many people with COVID-a lot of sleep initially followed by insomnia or other disruptions while sickest. Infected people had difficulty falling asleep, woke up more, and had a more restless sleep especially when they were most symptomatic. Overall, those people spent longer in bed and slept more after their symptoms began, the researchers reported in 2019.īut this wasn’t a restful sleep. Of the 100 volunteers, 28 people got sick. To see how respiratory infections affect human sleep, Axelsson and colleagues recruited 100 healthy adults to keep a detailed sleep diary after experiencing the first symptoms of a respiratory infection while wearing a sleep-tracking device on their wrists. “But at the same time, it then disrupts your sleep if you get a fever.” “The inflammatory system increases the drive for sleeping," Axelsson says. In studies from the 1990s and early 2000s, researcher Thomas Pollmächer and colleagues injected people with bits of bacterial cell walls, called endotoxins, and found that mild activation of the immune system increased the drive for sleep and enhanced non-REM sleep.īut once the immune system revved up with increased cytokine levels and symptoms of illness, people experienced more disrupted sleep, not typically seen in animals. But studies suggest that, at least to some extent, inflammatory molecules affect sleep in ways comparable to other animals. It’s harder to do the same kind of research in people, and results are mixed about how sleep changes during illnesses. When scientists block these cytokines, animals don’t sleep more-even when they are sleep deprived. When healthy animals are sleep deprived, levels of some pro-inflammatory cytokines in the brain rise, causing the animals to sleep more than usual. They get more non-rapid eye movement sleep, a deep restful state thought to be important for recovery and they spend less time in dream-filled REM sleep.Ĭytokines, a category of molecules that can stimulate or slow down inflammation, appear to play a major role in these patterns, Axelsson says. When researchers inject rabbits or rodents with moderate doses of bacteria or viruses, the animals sleep more. Studies in animals show that viruses and bacteria alter both the amount of time spent sleeping and the kind of sleep, says John Axelsson, director of the Sleep Laboratory at Stockholm University’s Stress Research Institute in Sweden. But infections can also disrupt sleep in complicated ways. Getting enough rest can help prevent infections, according to evidence and observations going back thousands of years. Sleep is intricately entwined with the immune system, a link both well-known and still mysterious. How sleep and the immune system affect each other Recognising the potential for the virus to upset sleep, experts say, can help people get the care they need. The links between COVID and sleep are still under investigation, but studies show that bacterial and viral infections, in general, interfere with sleep through physical and psychological mechanisms. As COVID-19 has swept through the global population, so too have reports of sleep disruptions both during an infection and in the weeks and months beyond. Waking in a panic in the middle of the night. “He knew I was waking up, but I don’t think he quite understood the severity of ‘awake.’” His sleep improved when he stopped testing positive, but the symptom was extreme while it lasted. That was more than two years ago and Thornes, a mother to three teenagers in San Diego, U.S., still struggles to sleep through the night every now and then.Ī similar thing happened to her husband during a recent COVID infection. Unable to fall back asleep, she would listen to podcasts, read, and scroll through Twitter before finally dozing off by 4 or 5 a.m. Six weeks after a mild case of COVID-19 early in the pandemic, Erika Thornes started waking up every night between 2 and 3 a.m.
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