How long can you survive without sleeping?. OUR HEALTH ADVICE - The record for time spent without sleep is 11 days. Lack of or chronic sleep deprivation can have serious consequences.
11 days and 25 minutes. This is the longest time spent without sleep by a human being. A record never officially equaled, won without the help of stimulants in 1964 by Randy Gardner, then a high school student in San Diego (United States). If the medical reports established at the time indicate that the young man got away without sequelae, such sleep deprivation is not trivial: sleeping is a vital function. It is therefore not for nothing that we devote about a third of our time to it.
Others have paid the price for such records. In 1983, researchers at the University of Chicago conducted an experiment on rats. They placed them on a circular platform placed on water (rats are afraid of water). As soon as the animals fell asleep, the discs began to spin to wake them up. After a few days, the rats began to lose weight and ulcers appeared on their coat. In three weeks at most, all the animals died. Faster than if they had been deprived of food.
Fatal familial insomnia, an extreme case.
It is uncertain whether such an effect would occur in humans, in whom such experiments obviously cannot be performed. Nevertheless, there is a kind of natural model by which to measure the damage of sleep deprivation. This is fatal familial insomnia, a very rare genetic disease (100 cases worldwide) which drastically reduces sleep time and for which there is no treatment. The patient quickly develops arterial hypertension, episodes of hyperventilation, urinary and genital dysfunctions, body temperature abnormalities, as well as various cognitive and motor disorders. Death, inevitable, occurs after 12 to 16 months.
Apart from this extreme case, no death directly linked to sleep deprivation has ever been recorded in humans (indirectly, in particular by road accident). "In reality, fatal family insomnia is a bad example," says Professor Isabelle Arnulf, head of the sleep pathologies department at the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital (Paris). “This disease paralyzes people, who lying down and without reflexes develop pulmonary embolisms, urinary tract infections or pneumonia and die. Nothing to do with lack of sleep, then.
Either way, chronic total or partial deprivation can have serious health consequences. “It is necessarily a risk, both physically and mentally,” asserts Dr. Sylvie Royant-Parola, psychiatrist specializing in sleep disorders and President of the Morphée network. "After 24 hours without sleep, the first dysfunctions appear," rebounds Professor Arnulf. "Some brain cells go dormant, and their numbers increase with the duration of sleep deprivation."
Intellectual abilities affected.
Increasing irritability, rapid alternation between states of euphoria and depression, burning or tingling sensation in the eyes, visual hallucinations, difficulty speaking, following logical reasoning, remembering recent events or orient in time and space. The brain circuits that fail first under the effect of total or partial sleep deprivation are those of attention, concentration, lateral vision, executive disorders. "People are making more and more mistakes, we see it in particular on daily tasks", illustrates Professor Arnulf. “The brain is like slowing down, it hinders decision-making. We see it with our interns: after their night duty, they are unable to make the decision to go home in the morning”.
In addition to the impact on current performance and mood, lack of sleep also has many physical effects. “The whole cardiovascular system is abused, with variations in blood pressure and heart rate,” says Dr. Royant-Parola, also a member of the French Society for Sleep Research and Medicine. Because sleep has an essential role in the preservation of this system. “When we sleep, heart and blood rates drop thanks to a cascade of hormones released at night and immobility. When sleep is fragmented or when it is lacking, this quickly causes hypertension, first at night, then during the day,” explains Professor Arnulf. This inevitably increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Metabolism and immune defenses.
“It also induces hormonal changes that affect weight and appetite. People are hungrier, metabolize food less well and gain weight,” continues Dr. Royant-Parola. Sleep is a special time that the body uses to replenish its glycogen reserves (a form of sugar storage). “If you don't sleep at night, you increase glucose consumption, which requires the secretion of insulin and therefore promotes the onset of prediabetes,” explains Professor Arnulf. Moreover, “at night, we stop producing appetite hormones in favor of satiety hormones. If we break this sy
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