Sleeping well is a life insurance that one in four Spaniards are not subscribed to. Despite adequate rest being an essential part of an individual’s health, and despite 20% to 40% of citizens suffering from insomnia, doctors neither ask about nor advise on sleep habits during consultations, an error that should be corrected, according to the signatories of an editorial published in the latest edition of ‘Archives of Internal Medicine.’
Indeed, the journal dedicates this issue almost entirely to studies associating insufficient rest or poor sleep quality with various diseases. In fact, spending the night tossing and turning in bed can aggravate certain mental illnesses, such as depression, or physical ones. Thus, people who sleep less than five hours each night have a three times greater risk of suffering a myocardial infarction than those who sleep seven or eight hours. Phyllis C. Zee and Fred Turek, from the Department of Neurology at Feinberg University in Chicago (USA) and authors of the opinion article, insist that “sleep is an indicator of health and getting enough sleep and quality rest should be considered an essential component of a healthy lifestyle like nutrition or exercise.”
In support of their statements, the American specialists recall that sleeping little alters the immune system, increasing the risk of suffering from various diseases. Moreover, disorders such as sleep apnea increase the chances of heart disease or developing diabetes. However, and “despite it being clearly established that sleeping well is related to health, the mechanisms responsible for this association are still unknown, so more research should be conducted in this area as well as in the development of safer and more effective treatments for various sleep disorders,” the editorial insists. As if the consequences of poor rest were not enough, it must be added that, “just as secondhand smoke harms non-smokers, sleeping poorly interferes with the health of caregivers. Thus, it has been found that those who care for children with chronic illnesses often interrupt their sleep every night, which impacts their body, causes fatigue, increases the risk of emotional disorders and irritability.”
The specialty of sleep has had a late recognition in medicine. Despite this, in recent years there have been important advances both in discovering the consequences of inadequate sleep and in the search for treatments. Likewise, the number of sleep units in hospitals has increased, but another pending issue remains: that in consultations, doctors ask their patients about their nocturnal habits and know how to convey the importance of sleeping well with as much vehemence as they support the Mediterranean diet.
