Characteristic Sleep Patterns and Associated Obesity in Adolescents

Abstract

Poor sleep adversely affects health and may cause obesity. Poor sleep includes short sleep duration, low quality of sleep, and sleep discrepancy. Although most studies have focused on the association between sleep duration and obesity, poor sleep is a significant risk factor for obesity. Adolescents have characteristic sleep patterns which correspond to poor sleep. Adolescents sleep late due to various biological and psychosocial factors; also, they wake up early to be on time for school. This causes them to sleep less. To make up for this sleep debt, adolescents sleep more on non-school days, which causes sleep discrepancies. Therefore, since adolescents have characteristic sleep patterns, an in-depth investigation is needed to identify whether poor sleep is a risk for obesity. This article presents an overview of the characteristic sleep patterns of adolescents, and reviews studies on the association of each sleep pattern with obesity.

Keywords: adolescents; body mass index (BMI); obesity; sleep disturbances; sleep duration; sleep patterns; sleep timing.

Figure 1

Current global sleep status in adolescents. The European and Canadian data was acquired from Gariepy et al. [39], with permission from Elsevier. Rest of the data was collected from the cited references [13,14,99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107,108,109,110,111,112].