Weight gain in teens can be caused by late bedtime: study

• comments
• 
• 

A new study reveals that teens and even adults who go to bed late at night are more prone to weight gain than their counterparts who have regular sleeping hours.

The study from University of California, Berkeley revealed that body mass index (BMI) is linked to sleep or lack thereof. This suggests that teens and adults who regularly sleep later than the usual hours are more likely to gain weight than those who sleep earlier.

For their research, the Berkeley team gathered data from 3,300 teens and adults from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The gathered data from the nationally representative cohort has long tracked the behaviors of American teenagers since 1995. The Berkeley study looked at the participants' major periods including puberty, college and young adulthood. The teenagers reported their bedtimes and sleep hours of the adolescents while calculating their BMI through their height and weight.

It was revealed that for every hour of lost sleep, the BMI index increased by 2.1 points. In their analysis, the researchers found that the connection between BMI and bedtime is not affected by total hours of sleep or how often they exercised. The findings are detailed in the October issue of the journal Sleep.

"These results highlight adolescent bedtimes, not just total sleep time, as a potential target for weight management during the transition to adulthood," said Lauren Asarnow, lead author of the study, doctoral student from UC Berkeley, via a statement published in EurekAlert.

According to the report by Business Standard, the results show that teens who do not get enough sleep at night also reported being sleepy at school. Lack of sleep affects the human circadian rhythm or the body clock. According to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), the circadian rhythm helps regulate a person's sleepiness of wakefulness through the day. Sleepiness is generally more intense when a person is sleep deprived and less so if there is sufficient sleep.

An article published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), short or insufficient sleep has been linked to weight gain, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and increased risk of mortality. Sleep is necessary to maintain "cognitive performance" and "high levels of attention" when we are awake.

In the report by University Herald, which cites the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, teenagers are recommended to get more than 9 hours of sleep at night. The NSF warns that teens getting insufficient sleep can increase their proneness for acne, pimples or the development of skin problems, hamper the ability to learn in school and make teens forgetful.