Teenagers ''staying up at night due to lack of morning light''
18/02/2010
A new study into the impact of light on teenagers'' sleeping habits has discovered that insufficient daily morning light exposure results in many teenagers not getting enough rest in bed each night.
Mariana Figueiro, assistant professor and programme director at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute''s Lighting Research Center (LRC) and the lead researcher on the new study, explained that if teenagers spend more time indoors, they miss essential morning light needed to help kickstart the body''s 24-hour biological system and its sleep/wake cycle.
Publishing their results in Neuroendocrinology Letters, Dr Figueiro and director of the LRC Dr Mark Rea found that 11 children between the ages of 13 and 14 years old who wore special glasses to stop short-wavelength morning light from getting to their eyes had a 30-minute delay in sleep onset by the end of the study, which lasted five days.
"These morning-light-deprived teenagers are going to bed later, getting less sleep and possibly under-performing on standardised tests," Dr Figueiro concluded. "We are starting to call this the teenage night owl syndrome."
It follows comments from Cat Smiley, a health writer for North Shore News, who highlighted how sleep allows a person''s body to shut down to base level to use the minimal energy to help the body recover.
Posted by Matt Gardner
