Institute for Continuing Education

Contemporary Perspectives of Adolescent Sleep

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this module, you will be able to:

• To identify the importance of sleep in the lives of adolescents.
• To examine the behavioral and biological processes that affect their sleep patterns.
• To acquire the tools needed for adequate history taking in children with sleep disorders.
• To evaluate the extent to which cultural factors influence the sleep of adolescents.
• To learn common sleep disorders seen in various adolescent agegroups.
• To assess how sleep (or lack thereof) affects behavior.
• To understand how to help patients and their parents overcome sleep disorders

Course Information

The need for the course arises from a number of sources, including increased concern about the fact that so many individuals are critically sleep deprived. For example, the Congressionally-mandated National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research cited insufficient sleep as a major problem associated with significant costs in terms of performance, productivity, and human suffering. Major catastrophic events, such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, and the Challenger reflect just a few of the examples of performance and judgment deficits that have occurred as a result of sleep deprivation. Recent interest has also focused on “personal catastrophes” due to mismanaged sleep or sleep disorders, such as automobile, trucking and airplane crashes.

Unfortunately, adolescents are rarely included in such assessments – with the exception of automobile crashes where epidemiological data point to an overrepresentation of young drivers in sleep-related crashes: interestingly, adolescents as a group appear to be among the most sleepdeprived in our society.

This module discusses the genesis and development of sleep patterns during adolescence, examines biological and cultural factors influencing these patterns, examines risks that may be a consequence of adolescentsleep patterns, and explores environmental factors such as work and school schedules and their effects on sleep.