Sleep Deprivation Might Play In Role In Reducing Vaccine Effectiveness

Your body’s antibody response depends on how much sleep you get every night. According to a new study published in the journal Current Biology, sleeping for less than six hours is linked to a reduction in antibody response — particularly among men. It could be similar to how Covid-19 vaccine’s effectiveness starts waning around two months after being administered.

“The protection conferred by a given vaccine depends on the magnitude of the individual immune response. Antibody response is a clinically significant biomarker of protection and is an early indicator of immunity,” the researchers wrote in their study.

So far, studies have identified some factors — like older age, smoking, hypertension, and obesity — that have been associated with a reduced antibody response after getting vaccinated. The researchers decided to look into how sleep patterns could potentially influence a Covid-19 vaccine’s effectiveness because a 2002 study revealed that people with restricted sleep had far lower antibody response following an influenza vaccine compared to those who were sleeping for six to nine hours a day.

In subsequent studies, researchers had mixed results while delving into whether fewer hours of sleep could be associated with reduced antibody responses to influenza and hepatitis vaccination. “Our objective is to better inform the scientific community and the public about a relatively easily modifiable behavior that may optimize vaccine response in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers added in their recent paper.

To investigate further, the team analyzed seven studies that looked into people’s sleep duration and hepatitis and influenza vaccines’ effectiveness. However, because there was a lack of data on Covid-19 vaccines specifically, the study highlighted the need to consider simple behavioral interventions like sleep that could improve people’s response to immunization.

“While all studies that performed objective sleep assessment were conducted in young and middle-aged subjects, the studies based on self-reported sleep also enrolled 65–85-year-old adults,” the researchers noted. “Given that sleep duration, sleep quality, and vaccination response are generally reduced and more variable in this age range, we performed an exploratory analysis excluding the older age group.”

“As suggested by our meta-analysis, adequate amounts of sleep (at least 6 h/night) during the days surrounding the time of vaccination may enhance the humoral response to diverse strains of viruses,” they concluded.

The National Sleep Foundation advises adults to sleep for at least seven hours every night up to a maximum of nine hours. And older adults above 65 need seven to eight hours of sleep. “However, large-scale studies are needed (1) to define the time window before and after vaccination where optimizing sleep duration is most likely beneficial,” the researchers added.

In a press release, the study’s co-author, Michael Irwin, director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA said:“We have previously found that cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as mindfulness, robustly improve insomnia and also normalize various aspects of immunity, although it is not yet known whether insomnia treatment can augment vaccination responses.”