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sleep a night, for three nights in a row. To stay awake, the volunteers were asked to do things such
as walk, play video games, watch TV, sit on an exercise ball or play ping-pong. Throughout the
experiment, one of the sleep-deprived groups got a nutritional drink with extra protein and
vitamins. The other group got a placebo drink: It looked and tasted the same but had no extra
nutrition.
Sleep Helps Wounds Heal Faster
ILIMA LOOMIS
APR 2, 2018 – 7:07 AM EST
Sleep clearly helped. People who slept normally healed in about 4.2 days. The sleep-
deprived volunteers took about 5 days to heal. And getting better nutrition offered no clear
benefit. Scientists sampled fluid from the wounds The group that drank the nutritional
supplement did show a stronger immune response at the wound. But that didn't speed the healing,
Smith reports in the January Journal of Applied Physiology.
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What to make of the data
Sleep expert Clete Kushida didn't find the results all that surprising. He is a neurologist at
Stanford University Medical Center in California. The idea that lost sleep harms the immune
system - and healing "makes total sense," he says. Yet studies that have tried to test this in
people and animals showed mixed results.
A good night's sleep can improve your mood, help you stay alert and boost your memory.
Now data show that getting enough Z's might also get your cuts to heal more promptly. In fact,
sleep was more important than good nutrition in speeding wound healing.
This wasn't what scientists had expected to see. They had hoped to show that giving people
a nutritional boost would make their skin wounds heal faster — even in people who were sleep-
deprived. That would have been useful for soldiers in combat, or for doctors working long shifts in
a hospital. The scientists thought it should work because good nutrition keeps the body's immune
system strong. That immune system helps repair injuries and guards against infection.
Why didn't nutrition help healing time? Smith can think of a few possibilities. The healthy
drinks may have helped a little - just not enough to show up clearly in the relatively small
numbers of men and women tested here. There was also a big difference in healing time between
individual participants, which could have made it harder to see a small effect due to nutrition. For
people who can't avoid lost sleep, scientists still don't have a nutritional way to help them heal,
Smith says. If you want to heal faster, your best bet for now is to get more "Vitamin Z.
= Sleep
Tracey Smith is a nutrition scientist at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental
Medicine, in Natick, Mass. She and her team studied three groups of healthy people who came to
their laba tory to take part in tests. They gave each recruit small skin wounds. Applying gentle
suction on their forearms, they created blisters. Then they removed the tops of these blisters. (The
procedure doesn't hurt, although it can be itchy, Smith says.)
72 I ESL 145
One group of 16 volunteers got a normal amount of sleep - seven to nine hours a night.
The other two groups of 20 people each were kept sleep deprived. They got only two hours of
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