Citation

Misiunaite I, Eastman CI, Crowley SJ. Front. Neurosci. 2020; 14: e99.

Affiliation

Biological Rhythms Research Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Frontiers Research Foundation)

DOI

10.3389/fnins.2020.00099

PMID

32116532

PMCID

PMC7029701

Abstract

Many adolescents fall asleep too late to get enough sleep (8-10 h) on school nights. Morning bright light advances circadian rhythms and could help adolescents fall asleep earlier. Morning bright light treatment before school, however, is difficult to fit into their morning schedule; weekends are more feasible. We examined phase advances in response to morning light treatment delivered over one weekend. Thirty-seven adolescents (16 males; 14.7-18.0 years) who reported short school-night sleep (≤7 h) and late bedtimes (school-nights ≥23:00; weekend/non-school nights ≥24:00) slept as usual at home for ∼2 weeks ("baseline") and then kept a fixed sleep schedule (baseline school-night bed and wake-up times ±30 min) for ∼1 week before living in the lab for one weekend. Sleep behavior was measured with wrist actigraphy and sleep diary. On Saturday morning, we woke each participant 1 h after his/her midpoint of baseline weekend/non-school night sleep and 1 h earlier on Sunday. They remained in dim room light (∼20 lux) or received 1.5 or 2.5 h of intermittent morning bright light (∼6000 lux) on both mornings. The dim light melatonin onset (DLMO), a phase marker of the circadian timing system, was measured on Friday and Sunday evenings to compute the weekend circadian phase shift. The dim room light and 1.5-h bright light groups advanced the same amount (0.6 ± 0.4 and 0.6 ± 0.5 h). The 2.5-h bright light group advanced 1.0 ± 0.4 h, which was significantly more than the other groups. These data suggest that it is possible to phase advance the circadian clock of adolescents who have late bedtimes and short school-night sleep in one weekend using light that begins shortly after their sleep midpoint.

Copyright © 2020 Misiunaite, Eastman and Crowley.

Language: en

Keywords

adolescence; bright light treatment; circadian rhythms; delayed sleep onset; sleep