Current scholarship and future questions on delayed school start times for adolescents’ sleep and well-being

[摘要] Over the last 25 years, we have developed a clear understanding of the implications of early school start times for delayed and insufficient sleep for adolescents and, in turn, the consequences include daytime sleepiness, challenges to academic performance, increased automobile accidents, substance use, emotional instability, and health concerns including weight gain and obesity [1–6]. Likewise, increasingly, researchers, educators, health care providers, secondary school administrators, and families are collaborating on research, policy changes, and the practical work needed to carefully consider how to effectively implement such a countermeasure to insufficient sleep: later school start times for middle and high school-age adolescents (e.g. Refs. 7–10). Since Carskadon and colleagues’ landmark study [11] demonstrating that adolescents’ biological sleep–wake schedules are constrained by early school start times, three recent systematic reviews and a recent special issue on school start times in Sleep Health capture the body of work, to date, on school start times and adolescents’ sleep [8, 12–14]. Taking these reviews together, there is significant evidence that delaying start times at the middle and high school level increases school-night sleep duration by at least 30 min, primarily by delaying rise times, and that later start times generally correspond to improved attendance, lower tardiness records, better grades, improved mood, decreased school health center/nurse’s office visits, and fewer motor vehicle crashes [8, 12–18].

[学科分类] 生理学