Journal of Sleep Disorders & Therapy
Open Access

Adolescent Sleep and Developmental Changes Associated with Major Diseases

Alona Shari^{* *}Correspondence: Alona Shari, Department of Psychology, Melbourne Sleep Disorders Centre, Melbourne, Australia, Email:

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Description

Adolescent sleep is typically short and low quality. During adolescence, they have variability and latency rise, and sleep duration and quality reach unsatisfactory levels. Adolescents are advised to get between 8 and 10 hours of sleep every night. Additionally, during adolescence, there is a change in the body's internal clock that causes sleep and waking timings to become later. The lack of adequate sleep during this period is assumed to be influenced by technology, social influences, and physical growth. Teenagers who have poor sleep hygiene have been found to have worse mental and physical health, increased rates of disease and mortality, and impaired brain development and functioning. Public awareness of the issues surrounding insufficient sleep throughout adolescence has grown significantly, particularly with regard to regulations governing school start times.

Developmental changes

Age makes adolescent sleep worse. Particularly, long-term studies show that the amount of sleep decreases when students move from high school to college. The quantities of time spent sleeping in bed, or sleep efficiency, also fell throughout this transition. Implicating that adolescent sleep length becomes less consistent over time, day-to-day variability in sleep duration increased during this transition. During adolescence, a number of social, physical, biological, and psychological aspects change, which affects sleep quality. Particularly, puberty has been investigated as a factor in teenage sleep alterations. There is a significant connection between sleep and pubertal development because Luteinizing Hormone (LH) is released at the beginning of pubertal maturation.

Sleep recommendations

The National Sleep Foundation recommends teenagers (aged 14 to 17) to get 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night. Additionally, they advise against sleeping for less than 7 hours or longer than 11 hours. Additionally, it is advised that young individuals (18 to 25 years old) have 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night and stay well clear of sleep durations of 6 to 11 hours.

Adolescent sleep researchers have carried out studies to offer more solid empirical support for sleep advice. A study which looked at a sample of American teenagers, younger teenagers, particularly those who have higher levels of depression problems, require more sleep the night before to have the best possible mood the next day. Additionally, a another study looking at young people in Mexico-America discovered that 7.5 hours of sleep was predictive of high GPA but 8.75 hours of sleep was predictive of lower internalizing symptoms. This finding suggests that optimal sleep duration differs depending on the outcome. More research is needed to understand individual differences in sleep duration during adolescence.

Sleep duration

Research suggests that since the early 1990s, sleep duration has been decreasing. Evidence also indicates that those with low socioeconomic position, ethnic minorities, and teenage girls endure the shortest durations. Teenagers go through physical and social growth during adolescence, which is known to contribute to poor sleep. Understanding how teen sleep problems are related to technology use is a growing field of adolescent sleep research. Importantly, evidence demonstrates that decreases in adolescent sleep duration are a universal trait of young people.

It has been discovered that insufficient sleep duration affects adolescent brain development. A study discovered that one year later, youth with reduced white matter integrity had higher daily variability in sleep duration. This outcome persisted even after controlling for its duration; It implies that sleep variability may have a greater impact on adolescent brain development than sleep duration alone. In a separate study, a sample of healthy children and teenagers' sleep duration was found to be significantly correlated with the grey matter volume of the bilateral hippocampus.