What are the health effects of extended sleep deprivation?

Yes.  It plays havoc with thinking abilities, decision-making abilities and performance in many areas.  Indirectly, these kinds of things can even lead to increased accidents and injuries.  The deficits have been shown to accrue over time.  Even if the sleep-deprived person feels he/she is performing well, objective tests still show the detrimental effects of chronic sleep deprivation. Reference: http://faculty.vet.upenn.edu/uep/user_documents/dfd3.pdf This information should not be used as medical diagnosis or instruction. Readers should consult appropriate health professionals on any matter relating to their health and well-being or that of their family members.

I was sleep deprived while taking care of my dying Mother and I wasn’t eating well. It lead to me having seizures. Seizures that landed me in the hospital.I think the seizures were cause by several things but lack of sleep was on the top of my list.I know consider sleep a very important thing.

Not sure if this pertains exactly, but some car accidents are from people falling asleep at the wheel. The show I watched on that mentioned late shifts.

Anonymous is correct. I would like to add that sleep deprivation in a long enough length can produce visual and auditory hallucinations and can seriously alter chemicals in your brain.My personal advice is to avoid it if you can.

The worst effect of extreme sleep deprivation is death (usually via a lethal infection). That effect is permanent.

Sleep deprivation can lead to many disease, particularly heart attack and heart failure. Before sleep, you’d better avoid talking serious topic or testing, and do not put your mobile next to you. Plug your phone in across your bedroom, do not affected by mobile messages. If you feel stessful when walk into your bedroom, just wait until you feel sleepy.I do hope I help you a lot.

Their actually isn't a lot known about the long term effects of sleep deprivation, the symptoms can disappear quite quickly after you start to get some sleep.Those symptoms can be things likeSlowed reaction time, Disorientation, muscle fatigue, increased blood pressure, auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations.But again those don't stick around if you can manage to get some sleep.I struggle with reoccurring insomnia as well and before bed I avoid anything with a screen and instead read, read, read. It calms your mind and prepares it for sleep.Chamomile tea before bed also helps. As does Melatonin.

This is just in the short term:Decreased Performance and Alertness: Memory and Cognitive Impairment Stress Relationships Poor Quality of Life Occupational InjuryFor more, visit the well-researched article where I pasted them from: http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/important-sleep-habits

As someone who suffers from sleep apnea and didn’t know he did for about 25 years, I can tell you that long-term sleep deprivation can and does have devastating effects on a person.A qualification before I go on: “deprivation”, to me, is the intentional deprivation of something. For sleep apnea sufferers, they didn’t know they suffered from the malady before it was diagnosed. So, it’s a bit wrong to claim that people, especially the sufferers of sleep apnea, CHOSE to deprive themselves of sleep.When you sleep, the body is supposed to be working on “repairing” or “restoring” itself from the previous day’s happenings. If you’re sleep deprived or suffer from sleep apnea, your body doesn’t have much, if any, chance to repair or restore itself. In my case, because sleep apnea means that not enough oxygen was getting to my blood, whatever damage done by exertion and/or exhaustion was not being repaired. Eventually, the cumulative effect of suffering from it for nearly 25 years was the contraction of the other two parts of what I call the “Unholy Trinity”, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For the uninitiated, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is fairly self-describing: you’re almost always fatigued, even after sleep, and it doesn’t take much exertion before you feel so tired that you don’t want to do anything. Fibromyalgia is a chronic, wide-spread pain throughout your body.Long-term sleep deprivation ends up having similar negative effects as sleep apnea does. Sleep deprivation can lead to hallucinations and exposure to “suggestion”, which is why it is used as a tactic of torture. Torture victims are were/are intentionally sleep-deprived can hallucinate so much that they have no idea where they are, what time it is, how much time has passed since they’ve been imprisoned, etc. A sleep-deprived torture victim will usually admit to anything or take a suggestion of anything to get the torture to stop.