Sleep: A 'Wake-up' Call!

Abstract

This report aims to attract attention toward the importance of sleep in medical students and young resident doctors. With growing stress levels among students, sleep problems have become a common affair. Concepts like sleep disorders, chronotypes, indicators of sleep deprivation are worth knowing. As found in a questionnaire-based review, significant gaps in sleep education exist today among medical students. There are many health hazards of sleep deprivation like anxiety, depression, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, increased error rate at work, breast malignancy, decreased dexterity and adverse impact on academic performance that are dealt with in this article. These issues are not covered well in the conventional didactic lectures on 'sleep' in the medical curriculum. The medical profession demands health caregivers to stay up all night and keep working. Hence, the current medical education curriculum should lay special emphasis on sleep education.