On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, J L Edwards wrote: > > While discussing the effects of sleep deprivation, a student > asked if one could die from lack of sleep. Aside from fatal > familial insomnia and not counting sleep-related fatal > accidents, is it possible for humans to die from sleep > deprivation?
Bearing in mind the exceptions ruled out by Jean, as far as I know, the answer is no. There are a number of classic studies on long-term sleep deprivation, one of the oldest, best, and strangest the case of the man who thought he could prove that sleep was just a bad habit (Katz & Landis, 1935). He didn't, but he did go for 10 days without sleep and proved that one could retain enough cognition to write an elegant if obscure and sexist acrostic sonnet at the very end of deprivation. Better than I could do with 8 full hours of sleep! He apparently suffered no lasting effects afterwards. More modern studies seem to confirm the lack of harm, although the golden age of sleep deprivation studies has passed, and I wasn't able to find any recent studies of note in PubMed. On the other hand, I'm not aware that anyone has looked beyond a few days of post-deprivation recovery to see if there was any lasting effect. Katz & Landis, I seem to recall, did mention some persisting paranoid delusion of their subject about the experimenters afterward (he blamed them for his failure to prove sleep only a habit), but this guy was so weird it was probably his normal state anyway. Everson (2000), in a recent report concerning the lethal effects of sleep deprivation in _rats_, had this to say about the effects for humans: "Although sleep deprivation is considered a risk factor for human disease, specific health impairments have not been definitively linked to sleep deprivation per se, and accordingly, it has no descriptive clinical signs...Most scientific reports of long-term sleep deprivation were conducted more than 30 years ago and employed physiological evaluations that were only rudimentary... The lack of evidence...does not indicate that sleep deprivation is harmless, but rather that its consequences...have eluded discovery". In other words, if rats die, it can't be good for us either! But no one has ever reported a participant in a sleep deprivation study dying (because you can bet we'd know about it if it happened). A report (Kripke et al, 2002) in all the newspapers just the other day found that sleeping six hours or less a night was associated with an increased death rate, with a 15% greater risk for those with less than 3.5-4.5 hrs/night. Of course, this is correlational, not necessarily causal, and sleeping _more_ than seven hours was also associated with increased mortality! On the other hand, there are a few rare individuals who seem to be able to get by just fine with little or no sleep. An example is Meddis et al's (1973) case of an elderly woman who averaged only about 1 hr per night, yet remained healthy and active in writing and painting. Lucky woman. So as usual, sleep remains a mystery. -Stephen Everson, C., & Toth, L. (2000). Systemic bacterial invasion induced by sleep deprivation. American Journal of Physiology, Regulatory Integrative Comparitive Physiology, 278, R905-R916. Katz, S., & Landis, C. (1935). Psychologic and physiologic phenomena during a prolonged vigil. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 34, 307-- Kripke, D. et al (2002). Mortality associated with sleep duration and insomnia. Archives of General Psychiatry, 59, 131-6. Meddis, R. et al (1973). An extreme case of healthy insomnia. EEG Clinical Neurophysiology, 35, 213-214 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy Check out TIPS listserv for teachers of psychology at: http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
