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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
Submitted via IRC for chromas
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:04PM (3 children)
If science has proven one thing, it's that humans are hard-wired to interpret correlation as causation.
I do sincerely believe that the vast majority of people just cannot differentiate between these concepts, regardless of how much they are explained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:17PM (1 child)
Its not "people", its medical (in this case) researchers. Then the general population ("the people") is just using the argument from authority heuristic and not thinking much about the topic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 04 2018, @08:50PM
Thus, it must be the case that the vast majority of people just don't get it, and never will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 05 2018, @02:18PM
There are also a lot of people who don't understand that certain sciences cannot exist without applied statistics.