Night owl teenagers who stay up late and rise early for school the next day, might be damaging their long-term mental health, a US recent study has revealed.
Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that short-term sleep deprivation in teens, prevents the growth and depletion of vital brain synapses – the connections between nerve cells which aids communication.
“One possible implication of our study is that if you lose too much sleep during adolescence, especially chronically, there may be lasting consequences in terms of the wiring of the brain,' says lead researcher Dr Chiara Cirelli.
Due to adolescence being a crucial period when the brain and nerves remodel themselves, researchers fear that young people who go to bed late, are more at risk of developing mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.
The research, which was tested on rats and published in Nature Neuroscience, was conducted to see how sleep patterns affected the anatomy of a developing teens’ brain using a sleep-wake cycle technique.
“These results using acute manipulations of just eight to 10 hours show that the time spent asleep or awake affects how many synapses are being formed or removed in the adolescent brain,' adds Professor Cirelli.