Dean Beebe, PhD, ABPP to present seminar, 8/30/19, 11:00 AM, LIB-110 “Sleepy, surly, spacey, sedentary, sugared-up, scary on the road, somatic/sore, and a bit less smart: The causal impact of short..”

Dean W. Beebe, Ph.D., ABPP
Professor, Director of Neuropsychology
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital

“Sleepy, surly, spacey, sedentary, sugared-up, scary on the road, somatic/sore, and a bit less smart: The causal impact of short sleep in adolescents”

When compared against consensus guidelines, adolescents in the US chronically get too little sleep, especially on school nights. Sleep duration guidelines are based heavily upon correlational studies that link short sleep with many of the major challenges in adolescent health. However, those studies are prone to confounding variables, and the much smaller experimental literature has too often used non-representative samples, unrealistic “doses” of sleep restriction, and non-applied outcome measures. This talk summarizes findings from an experimental research program that examines the impact of realistic changes in sleep duration on demographically diverse adolescents across a number of real-world outcome domains. Findings suggest that short sleep, at a level experienced by many adolescents, is causally related to daytime sleepiness, inattention, negative mood, poorer mood regulation, less learning, poorer vehicle control on the road, increased somatic complaints, and an obesogenic energy balance due to increases in both dietary intake and sedentary behavior. Further, findings suggest that so-called “naturally” short-sleeping adolescents would often benefit from getting longer sleep. This line of experimental research dovetails with past correlational studies to show that inadequate sleep causally contributes to adolescent health risk, opening new avenues for sleep as a broad health promotion tool and as intervention in particularly high-risk groups.

Friday, August 30, 2019, 11:00AM-12:00PM, LIB-110
University of North Texas Health Science Center
Fort Worth, Texas