The Healing Powers of Sleep: How Rest Strengthens the Immune System

A recent study looks at the healing powers of sleep, particularly when it comes to strengthening the immune system.

According to researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, they discovered that sleep carries the ability to prolong life in those with severe infections.

Lead researcher Julie Williams and her team found that sleep enhances the immune system response and boosts infection recovery in fruit flies.

"It's an intuitive response to want to sleep when you get sick," said  lead researchers Julie Williams, according to The Daily Mail. "These studies provide new evidence of the direct and functional effects of sleep on immune response and of the underlying mechanisms at work. The take-home message from these papers is that when you get sick, you should sleep as much as you can -- we now have the data that supports this idea."

For the study, researchers made fruit flies sleep deprived and then infected them with bacteria like Serratia marcescens or Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Findings showed that sleep-deprived flies had significantly higher survival rates than pre-infected ones.

"To our surprise they actually survived longer after the infection than the ones who were not sleep-deprived," said Williams.

Previous findings also showed that flies who got more rest were able to clear their bodies of bacteria more quickly.

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Sleep.