Sleep quality, chronotype and social jet lag of adolescents from a population with a very late chronotype
Sleep disorders can be a negative factor both for learning as for the mental and physical development of adolescents. It has been shown that, in many populations, adolescents tend to have a poor sleep quality, and a very late chronotype. Furthermore, these features peak at adolescence, in the sense that adults tend to sleep better and have an earlier chronotype. But what happens when we consider adolescents in a population where already adults have poor sleep quality and a very late chronotype? We have conducted two non-clinical studies in the city of Bariloche, Argentina aimed at measuring sleep quality, chronotype, and social jet lag, using the Pittsburgh and Munich questionnaires. These were administered individually to groups of high school students, as well as to smaller samples of adults and preadolescents, in order to study differences between adolescents and these groups. The results show that in this population sleep quality is much poorer than in most other healthy populations recorded elsewhere. Furthermore, sleep quality is consistently worse for adolescents than for the other groups. The difference with adults seems to be due mainly to increased daytime sleepiness and sleep latency, whereas the difference with preadolescents seems to be due mainly to shorter sleep duration. We also found that the chronotypes of all the groups are very late, with a peak at an age between 18 and 24 ys. Social jet lag and sleep onset latency are also large, and they peak at adolescence, which suggests that they might be closely related to the large prevalence of poor sleep quality that we find in adolescents.
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