Are your teens getting enough sleep? If not, you may want to keep an eye out for a new study to be published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. According to the study, adolescents who get poor or insufficient sleep may be at higher risk of developing alcohol or drug problems. And even your child may not be immune to the shocking repercussions.
Researchers discovered that sleep difficulties and the hours of sleep can successfully predict many different problems, including binge drinking, driving under the influence, and risky sexual behavior.
"Among normal adults, sleep difficulties and insomnia have predicted onset of alcohol use one year later, and increased risk of any illicit drug use disorder and nicotine dependence 3.5 years later," lead author of the study and director of experimental training in the department of psychology at Idaho State University, Maria M. Wond says. "Among adult alcoholics who received treatment for alcohol dependence, those with insomnia at baseline were more likely to relapse to alcohol use.
"The association between poor sleep and substance use has also been found in younger age groups. Overtiredness in childhood has predicted lower response inhibition in adolescence, which in turn predicted number of illicit drugs used in young adulthood. Overtiredness in childhood has also directly predicted the presence of binge drinking, blackouts, driving after drinking alcohol, and number of lifetime alcohol problems in young adulthood."
Wong and the co-authors analyzed data collected from interviews and questionnaires from 6,504 adolescents collected between 1994-1995, 1996, and 2001-2002. Researchers then used the data collected from the previous study to predict substance-related problems. Of the participants, fifty-two percent were girls while the remaining forty-eight percent were boys.
"The purpose of this study was to examine whether sleep difficulties and hours of sleep prospectively predicted several serious substance-related problems that included binge drinking, driving under the influence of alcohol, and risky sexual behavior," Wong says. "Sleep difficulties at the first wave significantly predicted alcohol-related interpersonal problems, binge drinking, gotten drunk or very high on alcohol, driving under the influence of alcohol, getting into a sexual situation one later regretted due to drinking, and ever using any illicit drugs and drugs-related problems at the second wave."
Previous studies on adolescents were mostly drawn from high risk samples, Wong says. And though this study is not novel in its approach or its findings, it is definitely making an impact on the field by further revealing the repercussions to abnormal sleeping habits.
"This study has added to the existing literature by establishing the relationship between two sleep variables - sleep difficulties and hours of sleep - and the odds of serious alcohol- and drug-related problems in a nationally representative sample," she said.
