Why sleep is essential for a healthy gut microbiome

New study adds more evidence to the importance of regular sleep

When I was a junior doctor, I would often work 72 hours non stop with less than six hours sleep. That was expected of us in those days, though we now know this is equivalent to working drunk or on drugs. No one was paying enough attention to the importance of sleep then apart from maybe narcolepsy, which was all I remember being taught about.

These days, sleep is fortunately a much bigger issue. We now know that sleep is really important for our overall health and that people who don’t sleep enough or don’t get regular sleep – like shift workers – have higher levels of inflammation and are at high risk of serious diseases like heart disease, obesity, kidney disease and many others. We also did twin studies showing a modest genetic component to how long you sleep.

Where does the gut microbiome fit into this? 

A recent study from scientists in the US at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, adds evidence to the importance of sleep for a healthy gut microbiome. The researchers looked at sleep and the gut microbiome in 720 adults, making it one of the largest studies to date. Importantly, they included men and women, unlike many of the previous smaller studies. 

Photo by Fabian Oelkers

The findings show that people whose sleep patterns varied, which they call night-to-night sleep duration variability, had a less diverse (i.e less healthy) gut microbiome. 

The same was true for people who had greater periods of wakefulness, those who spent less of their time in bed actually sleeping and people who reported that the quality of their sleep wasn’t very good.