Four years ago, 17-year old John Barnett was driving to band practice at 5:30 a.m. with a fellow student when he suddenly realized he was driving into oncoming traffic. He swerved to avoid a head-on collision and the car went out of control, striking a tree. John and his friend were killed instantly.

"John was a good kid," says his father, Ned, a public relations practitioner in Las Vegas. "He was popular, highly motivated to play tuba in the marching band, and he loved to stay up late at night playing computer games. Getting up early for band practice and staying up late at night both contributed to his accident. They went hand in hand."

John Barnett wasn't unusual. A 1998 study showed that only 15% of adolescents reported sleeping 8 or more hours on school nights, and 26% reported typically sleeping 6 hours or less. According to the National Sleep Foundation's 1999 Sleep in America poll, 60% of children under the age of 18 complained of being tired during the day (according to their parents) and 15% said they fell asleep at school during the year.

These results were confirmed by a 2003 Harris Interactive poll, which found that most high school students get less than 8 hours of sleep on school nights, and one-third get less than 7. And the evidence that sleep deprivation adversely affects the performance of millions of high school students is very strong. Most researchers agree that adolescents need an average of 9 hours of sleep each night.

The National Institutes of Health have identified adolescents and young adults (age 12–25) as a population at high risk for problem sleepiness based on "evidence that the prevalence of problem sleepiness is high and increasing with particularly serious consequences." And what are these risks?

"The most troubling consequences of sleepiness are injuries and deaths related to lapses in attention and delayed response times at critical moments, such as driving,"

noted NSF's Adolescent Sleep Needs and Patterns, a research report and resource guide published in 2000.

"Drowsiness or fatigue has been identified as a principle cause of at least 100,000 police-reported traffic crashes each year, killing more than 1,500 Americans and injuring another 71,000, according to the National High Traffic Safety Administration….Young drivers age 25 or under cause more than one-half of fall-asleep crashes emphasis in original."

One of the reasons adolescents are at such risk for sleep deprivation is that they are biologically "wired" to stay up late at night and to wake up later in the morning. As Mary Carskadon, PhD, a sleep researcher at Brown University and co-chair of NSF's Sleep and Teens Task Force, puts it: "Sleep-deprived students may be in school, but their brains are at home on their pillows."

One contributing factor to daytime fatigue in adolescents might be excessive use of computers, especially late at night when they are still alert. Teenagers use computers to do homework, to communicate with friends, and to play video games. Most sleep experts advise against using a computer for any purpose immediately before bedtime, because a bright computer screen is believed to affect the biological rhythms that govern sleep.

However, it seems that adding an exciting element to a computer task has an even greater effect. A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology suggests that performing an exciting computer task such as a video game on a bright display actually suppresses the production of melatonin, a hormone produced by the pineal gland in the brain, which helps to regulate the sleep-wake cycle. Melatonin production is triggered by the dark.

Furthermore, according to a Japanese White Paper on Communications, 53.7% of Internet users in Japan had delayed bedtimes and 45.4% of them had shortened sleeping hours. "These statistics suggest that performing a video display terminal (VDT) task influences the sleep-wake cycle and human biological rhythms," said

the authors of the study on computers and sleep. "It is not clear, however, what factors of a VDT task are physiologically related to this phenomenon."

"The risk of adolescents losing sleep due to computer game playing and Internet use seems high in direct proportion to the activating effects of these activities in combination, of course, with late-night access," observes Dr. Carskadon. "Whether melatonin secretory patterns are directly affected by the computer usage and whether phase shifts may result is still an open question. Regardless of effects on melatonin, however, latenight computer use opens another door to poor sleep regulation in teens."

How can parents prevent their teenagers from risking their lives by spending too much time on the computer? "You can't stop them from doing this," says Ned Barnett. "You can't force them to sleep. But you also don't want them to drive when they're too tired. If you have to get up at 5:30 in the morning to drive them to band practice, that's what you do. That's what I would have done if I knew there was a problem. But I didn't see it coming."

This article was published in the Fall 2003, Volume 5, Issue 4 of sleepmatters.