Can a person die of natural causes from the lack of sleep?

Question

Serious responses only please. Getting behind the wheel and being hit by a bus is not natural cause.

Answer 1

Lack of sleep will deplete your immune system drastically and you are susceptible to many disease, which you could have easily avoided with some quality sleep. Dying of natural cause due to lack of sleep will only happen in long run, but it will make you very weak, depressed, irritated, problems wiht concentration. Ultimately people will start running away from you, your performance in your work will start deteriorating etc. So overall its very bad.

Answer 2

The effects of full sleep deprivation in humans beyond eleven days have not been explored due to the health risks involved. Presumably, irreversible damage will soon follow, then death. This has been demonstrated in lab rats which died after being prevented from sleeping for two weeks. It is also evidenced by a very rare human brain disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia, where an adult individual slowly loses the ability to sleep, and the victims experience all of the above symptoms gradually over a few months. This disease eventually leads to dementia, permanent personality changes, motor paralysis, and ultimately death...So in a sentence, YES!

Answer 3

While there are no known/documented instances of people dying from sleep deprivation (even though rats in experiments have been shown to die after 28 days), there is a genetic sleep disorder that results in total inability to fall asleep and finally death, called Fatal Familial Insomnia. This medical condition is extremely rare. You can find out more about this disease on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia .

Other than that, lack of sleep can result in irritability, blurred vision, slurred speech, memory lapses, overall confusion, hallucinations, decreased sex drive, nausea, psychosis. Therefore, it is highly likely that fatal accidents can and will occur due to lack of sleep, however, it is not likely that sleep deprivation alone can be the natural cause of death for a person. Read more on sleep deprivation on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation

Answer 4

Yes. Your body NEEDS sleep. The body repairs itself while in the sleep cycle, so if you don't get any sleep it can't repair itself. Have you heard of sleep apnea? It's a medical condition where a person stops breathing in his/her sleep and wakes up literally hundreds of times a night but doesn't even know it because the waking periods are so short. The problem is it keeps the body from getting the restful sleep it needs, so it causes all kinds of problems including high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. All that just from waking up for a second or two over and over at night! Imagine the kind of damage no sleep at all can do...

Answer 5

I think that from I read about sleep you will start hallucinating if you go too long without sleep. I think your body would really start dozing off after a while and you simply couldn't stay awake even if you wanted to. I think I read it couldn't kill you, but it could make you crazy until you got some sleep. It would lower your resistant so it could indirectly kill you by making you more likely to die from other diseases and sicknesses. In fact, somewhere I read that a King was sentence for a year without sleep wandered if that was even possible to carry out? He would have been probably sleeping with his eyes open after a while.

Answer 6

no getting hit by a buss isn't a natural cause/ but ones' heart stopping IS... but then if that is the cause.. did they die of natural causes, or lack of sleep? would you classify lack of sleep a natural cause, or would you consider it murder because maybe the lack of sleep was because the neighbors dog barked all the time? hmm.. I do wonder!

Answer 7

if somebody doesnt sleep for a while, their immune system cant cope, and the energy that their body produces will barely be enough to sustain the person. They will get run down, and probably be susceptible to more diseases and bad stuff than if they had enough sleep. assuming that got bad enough, theoretically a person could die from lack of sleep.;

Answer 8

Lack of sleep is not a natural cause, but it can create myriad problems with physical and mental health. Those problems could conceivably lead to death.

Answer 9

The few people who have really tried lost muscular control, ended up hallucinating & eventually went to sleep - I stayed up for 57 hours once & wasn't making sense when I talked at the end.

Answer 10

Maybe. Lack of sleep will surely result to either low or high blood pressure, headache, nausea, vomiting, skin disease. Lack of it will make our body system weak . Because even machines need rest. You got that?