You must never neglect the signs of insomnia: the effect of lack of sleep on the body is huge.  First, insomnia can endanger your health and have an effect on your quality of life in case it is not dealt with correctly. It may even come to the point where you could no longer operate normally in day-to-day life. Say you decided to examine insomnia meaning, you will find that the effect of lack of sleep on the body is mental in nature as much as it is physical. But did you know that you can die from it?

The Effect of lack of sleep on the body, according to US researchers, is linked to a four times higher risk of early death in men; they urged public health policy makers to emphasize earlier diagnosis and treament of chronic insomnia.

In previous studies studying sleep duration, it has shown the effect of lack of sleep on the body in terms of poorer health, but have not investigated association with mortality, said the authors in their background information.

Dr Alexandros N Vgontzas, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine and Hershey Medical Center, said: ”The primary finding of our study is that insomnia, the most common sleep disorder, is associated with significant mortality in men.”

In this study of the effect of lack of sleep on the body and health, 1,000 women (average age 47) and 741 men (average age 50 years) provided a comprehensive sleep history and underwent a physical exam and slept one night in a laboratory, so that a polysomnograph could measure their sleep duration.

When they analysed the results for links between insomnia sleep duration and mortality, the researchers adjusted for potential con-founders, including age, race, education, body mass index, smoking status, alcohol consumption, depression, and sleep disordered breathing. They also adjusted for disease factors such as diabetes and hypertension. The group was then followed for about 10 years in the case of women and 14 years in the case of men.

During the follow, a total of 248 (14 per cent) participants died: 145 (21 per cent) of the men and 103 (5 per cent) of the women.

The 14-year adjusted mortality rate for men was 9.1 per cent for those without chronic insomnia who slept for at least 6 hours, and 51.1 per cent for those with chronic insomnia who slept less than 6 hours. But there was no such link between mortality and insomnia with short sleep duration among the women.

Vgontzas and colleagues concluded that:

“Insomnia with objective short sleep duration in men is associated with increased mortality, a risk that has been underestimated.”

What’s more is that other researchers have done studies using data from this same group of participants and found that chronic insomnia with short sleep duration are linked to higher risk of type 2 diabetes and hypertension, plus neurocognitive deficits.

Vgontzas said he hoped that this latest study, along with the previous ones, will increase awareness of the effect of lack of sleep on the body so that insomnia is diagnosed early and treated appropriately.

Speculating on why the findings only seem to apply to men, the researchers suggested one possibility was the difference in amount of data between the men and the women: the women were followed for less time and fewer of them died compared to the men: leaving open the possibility that, had they been followed for the same length of time, the outcomes could have been more similar.

However, don’t feel lucked out if you’re a female just because the death effect of lack of sleep on the body may not apply to women as there are many other side effect of lack of sleep on the body that applies to both male and female!