Why is lack of sleep fatal

Still, this is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the brain, Miller says, and "it's more likely that FFI patients die from neural degeneration, as opposed to lack of sleep. Interestingly, Miller encourages people not to be afraid of sleep deprivation, despite the known ill effects. We are built to withstand a certain degree of sleep deprivation.

Miller has a good point. Humans seem to be relatively capable during periods of sleep deprivation, complete or partial, although daily tasks feel more difficult and mundane. Randy Gardner would certainly say so.

Yes, you just read that sleep deprivation can't kill you, except in the case of the rare genetic disease FFI. Although it's true there's no hard evidence that people die directly from sleep deprivation, people can and do die from events related to sleep deprivation.

Lack of sleep can kill you indirectly by increasing your overall morbidity risk, says Dr. Shelby Harris , licensed psychologist, board-certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist and neurology professor. Medically, chronic sleep inadequacy can increase morbidity in a number of ways, she says, including:.

Complete and partial sleep deprivation also heavily affect your risk of accidents, falls and injuries. For example, operating heavy machinery including driving a car becomes extremely dangerous when you're running on little to no sleep.

Sleep deprivation may also increase your chances of dying from an underlying health issue that already exists.

For example, people have died during video gaming marathons which, on the surface, seems due to sleep deprivation. Additional experiments in mice confirmed that ROS accumulate in the gut when sleep is insufficient. The findings suggest the possibility that animals can indeed survive without sleep under certain circumstances.

The results open new avenues of study to understand the full consequences of insufficient sleep and may someday inform the design of approaches to counteract its detrimental effects in humans, the authors said. Each morning, we would all gather around to look at the flies, with disbelief to be honest. Scientists have long studied sleep, a phenomenon that appears to be fundamental for life, yet one that in many ways remains mysterious. Almost every known animal sleeps or exhibits some form of sleeplike behavior.

Without enough of it, serious consequences ensue. In humans, chronic insufficient sleep is associated with heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, cancer, obesity, depression, and many other conditions. Previous research has shown that prolonged, total sleep restriction can lead to premature death in animal models. Efforts to answer how sleep deprivation culminates in death have primarily focused on the brain, where sleep originates, but none have yielded conclusive results.

Spearheaded by study co-first authors Alexandra Vaccaro and Yosef Kaplan Dor , both research fellows in neurobiology at HMS, the team carried out a series of experiments in fruit flies, which share many sleep-regulating genes with humans, to search for signs of damage caused by sleep deprivation throughout the body. To monitor sleep, the researchers used infrared beams to constantly track the movement of flies housed in individual tubes.

They found that flies can sleep through physical shaking, so the team turned to more sophisticated methods. They genetically manipulated fruit flies to express a heat-sensitive protein in specific neurons, the activity of which are known to suppress sleep.

When flies were housed at 29 degrees Celsius 84 degrees Fahrenheit , the protein induced neurons to remain constantly active, thus preventing the flies from sleeping. After 10 days of temperature-induced sleep deprivation, mortality spiked among the fruit flies and all died by around day Control flies that had normal sleep lived up to approximately 40 days in the same environmental conditions. Because mortality increased around day 10, the researchers looked for markers of cell damage on that and preceding days.

Most tissues, including in the brain, were indistinguishable between sleep-deprived and non-deprived flies, with one notable exception. The guts of sleep-deprived flies had a dramatic buildup of ROS — highly reactive, oxygen-containing molecules that in large amounts can damage DNA and other components within cells, leading to cell death. It has only been found in about 40 families worldwide and shouldn't be a cause of concern for the average person.

Taking a nap during the day can feel like a naughty habit, but many healthcare professionals are Video appointments with qualified counsellors are now available in Patient Access. In fact, it seems that people can go without sleep for a surprisingly long time.

If you watched Channel 4 during the reality TV heyday of the early s, you may remember a show called Shattered, in which participants stayed awake as long as possible in order to win a cash prize. The winner, Clare Southern, managed a gruelling hours. Perhaps the most famous sleep deprivation study came in , when a year-old boy, Randy Gardner, voluntarily went hours 11 days without sleep. Although he was hallucinating by day 5, he seemed to suffer no long-term ill effects, and was sleeping normally within a few nights.

Since then, there have been a number of attempts to break this record, including a reported hours by Maureen Weston in However, the Guinness Book of Records has stopped certifying these attempts so as not to encourage people.

This means the true outer limits of endurance aren't known. And in fact, research into sleep deprivation generally has been stymied by ethical issues. You certainly couldn't ask human subjects to stay awake until they dropped dead. Animal experiments do suggest death by sleep deprivation is possible.

In the s, the University of Chicago conducted a series of experiments on rats, and found that after 32 days of sleep deprivation all the rats had died. However, in practical terms it seems the brain has a defence mechanism against prolonged sleeplessness. Stay awake for long enough, and you will be highly prone to microsleeps - temporary, unintended episodes of unconsciousness that may be just a fraction of a second long.

While microsleeps do serve a purpose, they are also part of the reason why you shouldn't drive when tired. So how does going without sleep actually affect your health? Groeger points out that very little gets better when we lose sleep.

Your resistance to bugs reduces, and if you were ill to begin with, your recovery slows. These changes are slight at first, but accumulate over time. Unfortunately, many of us are in this state much of the time whether due to insomnia, a busy life, or small children. Although we may attempt to compensate with caffeine, sugar etc, the only real antidote to sleep loss is sleep itself.