Several studies have shown that long-term COVID patients frequently experience insomnia and other sleep disturbances, in addition to well-known symptoms such as difficulty breathing and brain fog.
Cough until it’s hard to breathe. Shivering with chills, sweating with heat. I’m worried about who I sneezed on in the last 3 days. There are many reasons why people with COVID-19 have trouble sleeping.
However, according to some studies, sleep disturbances in patients with coronavirus infection may persist after the acute phase of the illness is over. We researched how people suffering from COVID sleep and found that many reported so-called ‘sleep disturbances’. The term refers to the problem of drifting into dreamland or staying asleep through the night.
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The most well-known of these problems is insomnia. People who suffer from it take a long time to fall asleep, wake up many times during the night, or wake up early in the morning.
Sleep disturbances during and after coronavirus infection
Studies show sleep problems after COVID has been present at the population level. His meta-analysis of 250 studies involving over 493,000 participants from 49 countries found that his 52% of COVID-19 patients suffered from sleep disturbances during infection.
Again, not surprisingly, the information is relevant for COVID patients who lie down at night and are frustrated by not getting sleep when they need it most.
As anyone who’s ever Googled COVID symptoms knows, the words ‘you’re not alone’ can be comforting, even if they don’t help alleviate symptoms. .
But it’s not just people in the acute phase of the disease who suffer. In an observational study starting in 2022, US researchers fitted his 710 study participants with wearable health devices that recorded breathing and heart rates, oxygen saturation, heart variability, and more.
Using these variables, 122 long-term COVID patients not only slept less per night, but also slept less than 588 control participants who were not infected with COVID-19. I also found the quality to be poor.
In another study published in the journal eClinicalMedicine, researchers sent an online questionnaire to survey 3,762 participants from 56 countries who had suffered from COVID for a long time between June and November 2020. bottom. Nearly 80% of participants reported sleep disturbances, with insomnia being the most frequent.
Whether physiological, psychological, or environmental factors (or a combination thereof) are responsible for sleep deprivation or poor sleep quality varies from patient to patient.
Why is sleep deprivation a problem?
A sleep-deprived night is not an unpleasant experience that makes it difficult to concentrate or even function as a human being the next day. Our bodies also use the time spent in dreamland to regenerate and fight infections. Strengthens the capabilities of the immune system.
Sleep promotes the redistribution of T cells to lymph nodes throughout the body. T cells are white blood cells that play a central role in the immune response, releasing antibodies that kill viral particles.
Furthermore, storing important memories, processing new information, and filtering out superfluous information all happen during sleep. And sleep prepares the brain to learn new information the next day, according to the independent sleep foundation run by US researchers and doctors.
