I remember when I was a teen, it seemed like I never needed to sleep. Now, if I don’t get 8 hours a night, I am a total grump.
But, a recent study showed that sleep deprivation in teens can be potentially dangerous. Lela R. McKnight-Eily of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the lead author of the study recently published in Prevention Magazine. She and other researchers looked at data from the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Study. That study collected info on teens in grades 9 through 12 from every state and the District of Columbia and included over 12,000 subjects.
One of the things they were asked about was their sleep habits and duration. If they students got less than 8 hours of sleep, it was marked as insufficient sleep. More than eight hours of sleep each night was marked as sufficient sleep.
The recent analysis of the information took the amount of sleep the teens got and compared it with eleven different health risk behaviors such as drinking sodas, smoking, drinking alcohol, thoughts of suicide, anger problems, depression, watching television, outside school computer use, and marijuana use.
McKnight and the others found that the lack of sleep was associated with ten of the health risk behaviors. The only one that wasn’t associated was television watching. The study concluded that, according to McKnight, insufficient sleep “is is associated with participation in health risk behaviors including substance use, fighting, and consideration of suicide.” The scary part is that the study suggests that more than two-thirds of American teens aren’t getting eight hours of sleep each night.
So while you may not be able to force your teen to get more sleep, this study may make you keep a closer eye on them for possible health risk behaviors.
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