Sleep deprivation eating into students' productivity

WASHINGTON -- Of all the things that affect American students' productivity, scientists say the culprit is a simple combination: sleep deprivation and absence of a midday siesta.

On any given day, almost 750,000 high school students -- about 28 percent of all American high-schoolers -- fall asleep in school, said Mary A. Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, at a recent sleep conference hosted by The National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting public awareness about nocturnal health.

And 100,000 middle-schoolers fall asleep during the school day.

Carskadon said schools have failed in important ways, such as making teenagers rise early in the day, which goes against the inclination of their biological clocks.

"Blaming the victim, the high school student, asking them to get up at 6 a.m. to catch the bus for school at 7 or 7:30, making them go to bed at 7:30 at night, in 2008 is an untenable position," she said. "It's not fair and it doesn't make sense."

Asked what time would be reasonable, Carskadon responded, "I don't have a magic-bullet answer. But I can tell you, 7 o'clock is too damn early."

Teenagers experience a change in sleep rhythms during puberty, naturally tending to stay up later at night.

Phyllis C. Zee, an associate professor of neurology, neurobiology and physiology at the Northwestern University School of Medicine, said teenagers try to recover from early school start times by sleeping in on weekends.

Several researchers at the conference noted that studies show naps offer a significant possible benefit to the sleep-deprived.

"I don't think we were meant to be uni-phasic sleepers -- to crunch everything into one night," Zee said. "If we were allowed, we would become bi-phasic sleepers."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)