To ensure vaccines work properly, men should get a good night’s sleep
economist.com
economist.com
What a garbage!
Secondly I really do not like the overall tone of the article.
More research. Which is exactly what they plead for in their paper.
Really recommend the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez to anyone interested in this and the problems that stem from it for women.
AFAIK, it's established that white blood cells are mainly produced when sleeping. So seems reasonable that lower white blood cell count makes vaccines less effective - in the same way vaccination for people with weaker immune systems are less effective.
A meta-analysis of the associations between insufficient sleep duration and antibody response to vaccination K. Spiegel, A. Rey, A. Cheylus, K. Ayling, C. Benedict, T. Lange, A. Prather, Daniel J. Taylor, M. Irwin, E. van Cauter less Published 1 March 2023 Medicine, Biology, Psychology Current Biology
Your input is appreciated, but I hope this space doesn't help breed hatred.
It's tough in today's world resisting the urge to take down others when we're suffering. But we all lose when we alienate those others who can bring intellectual sparks of joy into this world. Every voice matters, however brief it is.
I am baffled how you took that away from the article. Did we read the same thing? This is what they had to say about the results for women.
> As for why the results in women were not significant, Dr Spiegel and her colleagues theorise that sleep affects female response to vaccines too but that hormone interference, driven by varying stages of the menstrual cycle, contraception and hormone-replacement therapies, is probably altering immune response in profound and unknown ways that throw off the results. It is a subject area that urgently needs more attention, argue the researchers.
???
My sex ed at (UK Catholic) school was terrible and I can't really say I know any better than the rest of the comments here, despite both curiosity and actually asking questions when dating women. (Without asking cis women, I wouldn't have guessed that low BMI can inhibit periods, nor that The Pill can sometimes make periods worse rather than better, nor the ways the implant can go wrong; and without knowing a trans woman specifically I wouldn't have found out about different bone density, though I can't remember how that came up in conversation now as she and I never dated).
It is a bad thing that so many men don't/didn't get taught about the lived experiences of (just over) half the population, and are/have been just expected to find them alien and impossible to understand.
> varying stages of the menstrual cycle, contraception and hormone-replacement therapies
[0] or at least the @JusticeJuice quotation, as the free version of the article doesn't contain the link to the actual research paper…
From the paper's discussion
> Given that sex impacts the response to vaccine,9,25 we calculated separate overall ES for men and women. When sleep was assessed objectively, the pooled ES was large and highly significant for men, whereas it was smaller and not significant for women, likely due to the wide variations in sex hormone levels according to phase of the menstrual cycle, use of hormonal contraception, menopausal status, and use of hormonal replacement in post-menopausal women.25 None of the studies included in our meta-analysis controlled for these known hormonal modulators of immune function.
Men don’t typically need hormone replacement in old age, testosterone production rarely drops much, if at all. It’s why we grow bald, after all.
They don't limit their recommendation to only men, all patients should be encouraged to get plenty of sleep.
What on earth are you talking about?
Seems a little extreme. I'm guessing most companies don't have this so the best option is to work for one of them.
This includes the adolescents for whom the school starts way too early.
Unfortunately, societies interest in improving public health is non existent even with plenty of low cost, high reward actions that are known and proven beyond doubt.
And imagine if we could improve the effectiveness of vaccines in half of the world population by applying then in the right moment of them menstrual cycle.
There is some evidence (to my limited knowledge, please correct me if I'm wrong) that testosterone has some immune-inhibiting properties and women's immune systems are more reactive. Can this simply be a case of men's immune systems reacting to the antibodies at a slower pace?
Smells like BS.