The road to good health is paved with plenty of sleep. Parents and doctors have repeated this bit of wisdom for years; however, the link between your sleeping patterns and the onset of sickness was a parable based on correlation – not causation, the ultimate aim of scientific inquiry. But scientists have proven that, as always, your mother was correct: It turns out that people who skimp on sleep are four times more likely to catch a cold than the well rested.
A team of scientists led by Aric Prather, a sleep researcher at University of California San Francisco, set out to explore the link between sleep and sickness by recruiting 164 healthy volunteers between the ages and 18 and 55. For the first part of the study, participants self-reported their sleep patterns for one week. Scientists also used wristwatch-like device to track their motions to further verify their sleep ...
