New evidence suggested that skipping sleep at night can have a number of bad effects on your health. Researchers said that people who sleep six hours a night or less are four times more likely to catch a cold as compared to those who snooze for over seven hours.

Since a long time, poor sleep has been associated with chronic illness and even premature death. The researchers said the study, published online Monday and in the September issue of the journal Sleep, provided first proof that links less sleep and the risk of infectious sickness.

In an email, Aric Prather, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California-San Francisco, said that he often hears friends or colleagues showing off their ability to achieve things on little sleep. Prather, lead author of the study, said, "It is my hope that studies like this one will provide the necessary science to show conclusively that chronic short sleep has a health cost".

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic. In America, one in every five human beings gets sleep of less than six hours on an average work night, which is the smallest amount of sleep among six countries that the National Sleep Foundation surveyed in 2013.

Prather said that previous few studies on sleep and infectious illness were based on a person's self-reported history of catching a cold, recollection of his sleep patterns, or both.