IgA You Assay? The Correlation between Sleep and Stress

The most well known fact about sleep is that humans need it - while we are asleep our metabolic processes slow down and during long periods of sleep our bodies repair the damage that the stress our bodies have undergone throughout the day. Throughout the day our bodies are bombarded by signals from the environment, and undergoes biological changes in response to external and internal stimuli. Sleep is a period of time to restore the body to optimum condition to continue the process all over again the next day. The human body regulates stress by producing glucocorticoid steroid hormones, which also function as immune response suppressants. During sleep cortisol levels are decreased as they inhibit the body’s period of restoration. The production of immunoglobulin A, an antibody associated with mucosal membranes, is inhibited by glucocorticoids, and thus shows a relationship with sleep and other factors associated with stress. This experiment focused on correlations between sleep and stress found on the campus of Radford University. Our groups recorded the amount of sleep participants acquired the previous night and how long they had been awake, and correlated these with the concentration of salivary IgA. According to our initial data collection there was no significant correlation between the amount of sleep (p=0.305) or hours awake (0.670) to IgA levels. Additional sampling later in the semester will be used to supplement this data set and mapped using geospatial coordinates.