Key to fighting colds: Bond with your pillow

Last update: January 12, 2009 - 11:24 PM

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Fluff up the pillows and pull up the covers. Preventing the common cold may be as easy as getting more sleep. Researchers paid healthy adults $800 to have cold viruses sprayed up their noses, then wait five days in a hotel to see if they got sick. Habitual eight-hour sleepers were much less likely to get sick than those who slept less than seven hours or slept fitfully.

"The longer you sleep, the better off you are, the less susceptible you are to colds," said lead author Sheldon Cohen, who studies the effects of stress on health at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

Prior research has suggested that sleep boosts the immune system at the cell level. This is the first study to show small sleep disturbances increasing the risk of getting sick, said Dr. Michael Irwin, who researches immune response at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was not involved in the study.

During the cold season, staying out of range of sneezing co-workers may be impossible.

The study in Monday's Archives of Internal Medicine mimicked those conditions by exposing participants to a common cold virus -- rhinovirus -- and most became infected with it.

But not everyone suffered symptoms. The people who slept less than seven hours a night in the weeks before they were exposed to the virus were three times more likely to catch a cold than those who slept eight hours or more.

Harvard sleep researcher Sat Bir Khalsa said people do not need to turn to prescription sleep aids to improve their sleep. Setting a regular bedtime, moving computers and televisions out of the bedroom and, when restless, getting out of bed for a while and doing something soothing can help.

HELP FOR TRACKING HEALTH HISTORY

A good family health history is far more important than a gene test in predicting your future medical needs, but it's underused. Today, the government begins offering a free new service to try to change that -- helping people compile one at home. They can e-mail it to relatives who can fill in the gaps and then pop it straight into their doctors' computers.

Quiz enough extended family about who battled what disease, and you can fill it out in as little as 20 minutes, said Acting Surgeon General Steven Galson, whose office spearheaded the new initiative.

The office issued the first attempt to guide creation of family health trees in 2004. Today, the site reopens -- familyhistory.hhs.gov -- after a facelift to make it more in-depth and truly electronic. The tool is readable, even customizable, by many of the computer systems that doctors are using to create electronic medical records.

FIRMS CAN PROMOTE SOME OFF-LABEL USES

Food and Drug Administration officials have finalized guidelines that make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to use medical journal articles to promote drugs for unapproved uses.

The final guidelines, which have been criticized by some lawmakers as too lenient, allow companies to distribute articles about their products to doctors -- even when they involve uses that have not been federally approved.

The FDA document, posted online Monday, comes just days before the end of President Bush's administration.

The FDA had allowed company salespeople to distribute articles about off-label uses if they are published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. But that law expired in September 2006, and drugmakers have been lobbying to renew it ever since.

FDA said the guidelines also recommend that companies disclose any financial relationships with article authors.

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