Whether you have too much sleep or lack of sleep, you are more likely to have pulmonary fibrosis, based on a new study from the University of Manchester.
Findings of “The circadian clock protein REVERBα inhibits pulmonary fibrosis development” show that compared to those who sleep the healthy seven hours a night, participants who regularly sleep four hours or less in a day had twice the chance of developing pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung disease caused by damaged or scarred lung tissue. Meanwhile, those who sleep 11 hours or longer in a day tripled their chance, compared to those sleeping seven hours per day.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study investigated 500,074 participants under the long-term UK Biobank study, which includes genomic data on more than half a million UK residents. Researchers considered known risk factors for pulmonary fibrosis such as body mass index, smoking, sex, and age.
The lungs are not able to function properly if the tissue is thicker and stiffer. People suffering from the disease experience short of breath as the disease progresses.
Dr. John Blaikley, the study’s lead author, and his colleagues point out that the link between sleep duration and pulmonary fibrosis is similar in strength to other known risk factors for the disease. They indicate that the basis of the association is the circadian clock, which regulates cells and responsible for the 24-hour cycles in many biological processes, from sleeping to metabolism.
Researchers discovered that in patients with pulmonary fibrosis, the oscillations of the clock have an impact on the fibrotic tissue in the small air spaces called alveoli. Pulmonary fibrosis happens when the tissue around alveoli thickens or gets scarred.
"Pulmonary fibrosis is a devastating condition which is incurable at present. Therefore, the discovery that the body clock is potentially a key player potentially opens new ways to treat or prevent the condition. More work will need to be done around studying the association between pulmonary fibrosis and sleep duration to establish both causation and reproducibility. If these results are confirmed, then sleeping for the optimal time may reduce the impact of this devastating disease,” says Blaikley.
