Long-term study supports detrimental effects of television viewing on sleep in young children

A study following more than 1,800 children from ages 6 months to nearly 8 years found a small but consistent association between increased television viewing and shorter sleep duration. The presence of a television in the room where a child sleeps also was associated with less sleep, particularly in minority children. Investigators from MassGeneral Hospital for Children (MGHfC) and Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) report their results – the first to examine the connection between television and sleep duration over several years – in the May issue of Pediatrics.

The study participants, children and their mothers, were enrolled in Project Viva, a long-term investigation of the health effects of several factors during pregnancy and after birth. This study analyzed information – reported by mothers when the children were around 6 months old and then annually for the next seven years – regarding how much time each day infants were in a room where a television was on, how much time older children watched television daily, whether children ages 4 to 7 slept in a room where a TV was present and their child’s average daily amount of sleep.

The study revealed that, over the course of the study, each additional hour of television viewing was associated with 7 fewer minutes of sleep daily, with the effects appearing to be stronger in boys than in girls. Racial and ethnic minority children were much more likely to sleep in a room where a television was present, and among those children, the presence of a bedroom television reduced average sleep around a half-hour per day.

The study authors note their results support previous short-term studies finding that both television viewing and sleeping in a room with a television decrease total sleep time, which can have negative effects on both mental and physical health.

Eat to Dream: Penn Study Shows Dietary Nutrients Associated with Certain Sleep Patterns

“You are what you eat,” the saying goes, but is what you eat playing a role in how much you sleep? Sleep, like nutrition and physical activity, is a critical determinant of health and well-being. With the increasing prevalence of obesity and its consequences, sleep researchers have begun to explore the factors that predispose individuals to weight gain and ultimately obesity. Now, a new study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania shows for the first time that certain nutrients may play an underlying role in short and long sleep duration and that people who report eating a large variety of foods – an indicator of an overall healthy diet – had the healthiest sleep patterns. The new research is published online, ahead-of-print in the journal Appetite.

Previously unknown sleep pattern revealed in University of Sydney research

There’s no need to panic if you didn’t get a solid eight hours of beauty sleep last night. According to new University of Sydney research, sleep duration naturally waxes and wanes over a period of days regardless of individual lifestyle, timing of sleep or waking, and social and environmental influences.

With further research, the discovery could have important implications for predicting work performance, managing fatigue-related accidents after shift work, and treatment recovery in clinical populations.

"Sleep requirements vary in a cyclical fashion and between individuals. If you incur a sleep debt, your body will signal a need to catch up on extra sleep," says Dr Chin Moi Chow, principal investigator of the article published in Nature and Science of Sleep.

"As you increase your sleep duration to recover from the debt, your ability to prolong wakefulness increases. Then, as prior wakefulness increases, sleepiness is inevitable, and a need for further sleep develops again."

Dr Chow and colleagues Shi Wong and Dr Mark Halaki, from the University’s Faculty of Health Sciences, monitored a group of healthy young males over a fortnight using an actigraph - a small activity recording device worn like a wristwatch on the non-dominant arm - designed to measure sleep patterns.

To the researchers’ fascination, the actigraph data showed participants’ sleep duration oscillated in a sine wave pattern - a phenomenon that had not previously been observed. Clear periodic patterns were found in the majority of the participants, varying from periods of between two and 18 days.

The cyclic pattern observed in the research suggests that the sleep balance mechanism operates on an ongoing basis in daily life, with changes in sleep duration constantly accompanied by compensatory adjustments.

Interestingly, despite the fact that participants in the study habitually slept below the recommended seven to eight hours a night, they still maintained a cyclic sleep duration pattern.

"Our sleep quantity and quality vary according to a range of factors," Dr Chow says. "Some individuals have a slower accumulation or faster dissipation of sleep pressure, which may define their pattern of total sleep time."

Variations in daily sleep duration may also arise from differences such as slight variations in the body clock or external factors like temperature, daylight, exercise, or eating and drinking patterns.

"Changing your sleep patterns on weekends, or resetting the pattern through shift work, could alter your sleep duration cycle and could put the body under significant strain," says Dr Chow.

This research is part of Dr Chow’s broader interest in the lifestyle factors influencing sleep. The team hopes to follow the research by examining the cyclical phenomenon in special groups such as long or short sleepers and people with insomnia.