Melinda Jackson is a senior research fellow at RMIT University’s Health Sciences school who has investigated sleep’s effect on the body. She said despite commonly held beliefs that people could easily catch up on a string of late nights by having a long sleep on weekends, it may be much harder to regain normal functioning once we have become sleep deprived.
“Fantastic data has just come out, laboratory data, that has shown that after a week of sleep restriction it might actually take five nights of 12 hours’ time in bed for someone’s performance to come back to their baseline level,” Dr Jackson said.
When we looked specifically at the worst sleepers … they were more than five times more likely to have preclinical Alzheimer’s disease than good sleepers Yo-El Ju, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University
Source: Sleep deprivation: Six ways being tired can damage your life – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
