‘Catastrophic’ Sleep Loss Fueling Death Rates: Expert

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Those sleepness nights are doing more than leaving you feeling tired in the  morning. A leading expert on slumber says a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic” is causing a host of potentially fatal diseases and shortening many people’s lives.

Matthew Walker, director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California-Berkeley, tells the Guardian that sleep deprivation affects “every aspect of our biology” and has become widespread in modern society.

Electric lights, television, and computer screens that emit sleep-preventing “blue light,” are primary factors in the epidemic. In addition, longer commutes, the blurring of lines between work and personal time, and other pressures of modern life are adding to sleep deprivation, defined as less than seven hours a night.

And the impacts are significant, with many studies linking sleep deprivation to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, obesity and poor mental health among other health problems. I

“No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,” Walker tells the Guardian. “It sinks down into every possible nook and cranny. And yet no one is doing anything about it. Things have to change: in the workplace and our communities, our homes, and families.

“But when did you ever see [a pub health campaign] poster urging sleep on people? When did a doctor prescribe, not sleeping pills, but sleep itself? It needs to be prioritised, even incentivised.”

Walker, whose book “Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams” is due out next month, says he has a “non-negotiable, eight-hour sleep opportunity every night” and keeps “very regular hours.”

He adds: “I take my sleep incredibly seriously because I have seen the evidence.

“Once you know that after just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep, your natural killer cells – the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day – drop by 70 percent per cent, or that a lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast, or even just that the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen, how could you do anything else?”