The public health impact of poor sleep on severe COVID-19, influenza and upper respiratory infections

Background Poor sleep is associated with an increased risk of infections and all-cause mortality, and acute sleep loss and disruption have been linked with inflammation and poorer immune control. Previous studies, however, have been unable to evidence causality between the chronic effects of poor sleep and respiratory infection risk. In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and potential future disease outbreaks, understanding the risk factors for these infections is of great importance. Aim Our goal was to understand if chronic poor sleep could be identified as a causal risk factor for respiratory infections including influenza, upper respiratory infections and COVID-19. Methods We used population cohorts from the UK Biobank (N ≈ 231,000) and FinnGen (N ≈ 327,000) with ICD-10 based electronic health records and obtained diagnoses of insomnia, influenza and upper respiratory infections (URIs) from primary care and hospital settings. We computed logistic regression to assess association between poor sleep and infections, disease free survival hazard ratios, and used summary statistics from genome-wide association studies of insomnia, influenza, URI and COVID-19 to perform Mendelian randomization analyses and assess causality. Findings Utilizing 23 years of registry data and follow-up, we saw that insomnia diagnosis associated with increased risk for infections in FinnGen and in UK Biobank (FinnGen influenza HR = 5.32 [4.09, 6.92], P = 1.02×10 −35 , UK Biobank influenza HR = 1.54 [1.37, 1.73], P = 2.49×10 −13 ). Mendelian randomization indicated that insomnia causally predisposed to influenza (OR = 1.59, P = 6.23×10 −4 ), upper respiratory infections (OR = 1.71, P = 7.60×10 −13 ), COVID-19 infection (OR = 1.08, P = 0.037) and risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 (OR = 1.47, P = 4.96×10 −5 ). Conclusions Our findings indicate that chronic poor sleep is a causal risk factor for contracting respiratory infections, and in addition contributes to the severity of respiratory infections. These findings highlight the role of sleep in maintaining sufficient immune response against pathogens as suggested by earlier work. As the current COVID-19 pandemic has increased the number of people suffering from poor sleep, safe interventions such as sleep management and treating individuals with insomnia could be promoted to reduce infections and save lives.