Sleep-deprived teens more apt to drink, smoke and have unsafe sex:
Teens who get too little sleep may be more likely to engage in risky behaviors like drinking, smoking, and unprotected sex than their peers who get enough rest at night, a study of U.S. high school students suggests.
Roughly seven in 10 American high school students average less than eight hours of sleep a night, falling short of the recommended eight to 10 hours adolescents need for optimal physical and mental health, the study found.
Compared with teens who got at least eight hours of sleep, high school students who got less than six hours were twice as likely to drink alcohol, almost twice as likely to use tobacco, and more than twice as likely to use other drugs or engage in risky sexual activity.
High school students who got less than six hours of sleep a night were also more than three times more likely to engage in self-harm activities or to contemplate or attempt suicide, compared to teens who got eight hours or more of sleep on a typical night.
While the study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how sleep might directly impact teen behavior, it’s possible that insufficient sleep leads to changes in the brain that make risky behavior more likely, said lead study author Matthew Weaver of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
[...] One limitation of the study is that it relied on teenagers to accurately report their sleeping habits and risky behaviors, the authors note. It’s also possible that factors not measured in the study might impact both sleep times and risky behaviors.
Journal Reference:
Matthew D. Weaver, PhD; Laura K. Barger, PhD; Susan Kohl Malone, PhD, RN, NCSN; et al Lori S. Anderson, PhD, RN, CPNP-PC, NCSN; Elizabeth B. Klerman, MD, PhD
JAMA Pediatr. Published online October 1, 2018. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2018.2777
Dose-Dependent Associations Between Sleep Duration and Unsafe Behaviors Among US High School Students
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:03PM (7 children)
This was my first thought. That and it was an uncontrolled experiment.
Personally, i was very sleep deprived growing up (we lived far from school, so it took a few hours each way) and didn't engage in any of their risky behaviors. Maybe they should study why some kids did while others did not and figure out why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @09:01PM (1 child)
Single obs may disprove physics, not so much other stats based “science”.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:18PM
Corner cases are always the most interesting.
Stick 100 identical plants in a dark room for a month and they all die. OK, plants die in the dark.
Stick 100 identical plants in a dark room for a month and they all die except one which seems to thrive. You could learn a lot about what it takes to survive in the dark. Maybe a variation in the soil, temperature variation in the room, a special protein, genetically different chlorophyll?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RandomFactor on Thursday October 04 2018, @10:28PM (2 children)
Same thing, just reading it 'correlation is not causation' jumped out at me.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:53PM (1 child)
More apropos, I think they may need to think a bit harder about which is cause and which is effect.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday October 05 2018, @07:52AM
And they all might be symptoms of a problematic household. Some parents might take the videogame away from you because you need to sleep, others don't care or even engage in similar behavior and the kid learns.
OTOH sleep deprivation surely messes up the depth of decision making processes, which means that a well done experiment (which can't be performed because it's cruel towards teens) would probably find a cause effect link between sleep deprivation and bad decisions anyway.
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(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday October 04 2018, @11:52PM (1 child)
I've never smoked, never touched alcohol. Not one sip -- I saw what it did to my brother. And I don't get too much sleep. 3, 4, 5 hours and I'm PERFECTO!!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday October 05 2018, @07:54AM
You're doing a tremendous job (if you are trying to corroborate that study in the summary).
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