Sleeping late on weekends hurts teens' focus

Sleeping late on weekends may not be the answer to sleep lost during the week. High school students in a recent study had more trouble with tests after catching up on sleep over the weekend.

The tests measured a person’s ability to pay attention and were part of a study of about 2,600 urban high school students from South Korea. Students who slept in on the weekends made more mistakes on the tests than students who slept the same amount on weekdays and weekends.

The average amount of sleep per student in the Korean study was 5 hours and 42 minutes on weekdays. This was well below the nine or more hours of sleep that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) recommends for teenagers.

However, catching up on sleep on weekends did not give these students an advantage. The teens who maintained the same sleep hours on weekends as the weekdays scored higher on the attention tests throughout the school term.

Researchers said the results could be helpful information for doctors. It may help them identify teenage patients who are not getting enough sleep and are having trouble concentrating. The study was published in the September 2011 edition of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Sleeping in on weekends doesn’t seem to work for adults, either. An earlier study showed that adults sleeping six hours a night during the week had lower scores on coordination tests. The low scores remained even after adults slept-in a couple hours on the weekend.

Read more blog posts about teens and sleep. Learn more from the AASM about teens and sleep loss—and take a quiz to rate sleepiness—on the Your Sleep website.

Photo by Star Guitar

Early School Start Times Endanger Teen Drivers, Study Finds

Teens as a group are notoriously bad drivers, with the highest annual accident and traffic violation rate of any age group in the United States. Parents have good reason to fear for the worst every time their child gets behind the wheel: auto accidents are the leading cause of death for America’s teens.

A recent study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine is directing some of the blame on schools for creating dangerous driving conditions for teens. The study found that accident rates are 41 percent higher when high school classes begin before 7:30 a.m.

The study compared teen accident rates at two demographically similar neighboring communities in southeast Virginia: Chesapeake and Virginia Beach.

Accident data from 2008 provided by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles showed that there were 65.8 auto crashes for every 1,000 teen drivers in Virginia Beach compared to 46.6 for Chesapeake.

The only significant difference, according to the authors, was school start times. Classes started at 7:20 a.m. in Virginia Beach. Students in Chesapeake were able to sleep in an extra hour and twenty minutes because of the 8:40 a.m. start time.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reports that the average teen needs more than nine hours of sleep per night. Falling asleep early can be difficult for teens because of natural night-owl tendencies and distractions such as smart phones and video games. As a result, teens often fail to get enough sleep and may drive to school with severe sleep deprivation.

Pushing forward start times for high school students will help them get more sleep, and as a result, make the roads safer. School districts across the United States have taken notice and have moved the opening high school bell to 8 a.m. or later.

Learn more about the sleep habits of teenagers.

Image by Carlos Lei