sleep deprivation affects your immune system

This article talks about how the lack of sleep affects your immune system. They made experiments on middle age people and tracked their sleep patterns and studied how strong an immune response they showed to a standard three-dose hepatitis B vaccine. People who got less than 6 hours of sleep per night were less likely to show good response to the antibodies of the vaccines.

Sleep deprivation is very common in Americans and may have other consequences like weight gain, diabetes, heart attack, stroke and even breast cancer. This risk could be related to changes in hormone levels , these alter levels of the hormone melatonin in the body. When people are sleep-deprived there are fluctuations in cell types which is important in antibody production, there are also alterations in some hormones that influence the immune system like cortisol and growth hormone.

This was brought to my attention since is common among college student to sleep less than usual during periods of high levels of stress, which may affect us in our performance in school, besides having physiological effects on us.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/08/01/why-lack-of-sleep-weakens-vaccine-effectiveness/