The Impact of Sleep Health as a Healthy Lifestyle on Coping with Coronavirus Vulnerability: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Background: Sleep health is a relatively new term in the sleep literature and an emerging concept in sleep medicine. Lack of attention to health sleep, leads to an increase in the incidence of various physical, mental, and immune disorders against infectious diseases.Methods: This Narrative review study was conducted in September 2021. Studies and articles published in PubMed Databases, Web of Science, and Google search engine from 1983 to January 2021 were included in the study. All reviews and cross-sectional studies found through the keywords, including Sleep, sleep Health, Sleep Hygiene, Underlying diseases, COVID-19, and coronavirus, were reviewed regardless of the publicationlanguage.Results: According to the collected evidence, sleep deprivation is one of the main causes of underlying diseases, and people with underlying diseases are most vulnerable to COVID-19. Also, East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea, with more scientific production in the field of healthy sleep, compared to EU member states, can protect themselves from diseases caused by unhealthy sleep and have lower mortality rate of COVID-19 infection.Conclusion: given the vulnerability of underlying diseases to coronavirus, one of the most important functional areas and preventive factors in the occurrence of the underlying diseases that should be considered is sleep health. Encouraging and promoting sleep health is also important as a protective factor in preventing and managing COVID-19 infectious diseases. Sleep health might also be one of the important factors playing a role in the vulnerability of COVID-19 in different societies.

Keywords

• coronavirus
• covid-19
• healthy sleep
• sleep health
• underlying diseases