Lack of sleep leads to lower antibody response from vaccination

Getting a good night’s sleep before getting vaccinated may help a vaccine’s effectiveness. A meta-analysis was conducted by an international team of researchers to summarize the evidence linking the amount of sleep obtained in the days surrounding vaccination to antibody response in healthy adults. The study focused on responses to the influenza and hepatitis vaccines. The “results provide evidence that insufficient sleep duration substantially decreases the response to anti-viral vaccination and suggests that achieving adequate amount of sleep during the days surrounding vaccination may enhance and prolong the humoral response,” researchers wrote in Current Biology. They noted a study published in 2022 found that “sleep restriction in the days surrounding influenza vaccination showed that immunoglobulin (IgG) antibody titers 10 days after inoculation were less than half of those measured in control subjects.” Other studies investigating the role of insufficient sleep and responses to influenza and hepatitis vaccination have had mixed results, and many of the studies were small. The meta-analysis included studies that addressed nocturnal short sleep duration and antibody response after vaccination in healthy adults. A total of seven studies encompassing a total of 504 adults aged 18 to 85 years met study criteria. Both subjective and objective sleep duration measures were in the mix. When analyses were performed for men and women separately, the association between self-reported short sleep (fewer than six hours of sleep per night) and antibody response was significant in men, but less so in women though still significant, the study said. The researchers also looked at the data after excluding adults aged 65 and over since they tend to sleep less and generally have other issues related to vaccine effectiveness. Here, it was found that in the remaining total sample of 299 adults ages 18 to 60, a more significant association was seen between less sleep and lower titers than of the study population as a whole. While the vaccines against SARS-Cov-2 were not included in the study, the researchers speculated that “If similar to the influenza and hepatitis vaccines, the antibody response to COVID-19 vaccines is adversely affected by insufficient sleep, then insufficient sleep around the time of COVID-19 vaccination may reduce antibody titers in the same range as the waning of the response to the most commonly administered vaccine over two months.”

Lack of sleep leads to lower antibody response from vaccination

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