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Increased TV viewing led to decreased sleep duration
Increased television viewing and a television in the bedroom could lead to shorter sleep duration, according to recent study results published in Pediatrics.
“Given the associations between greater TV viewing and shorter sleep suggested by this study and the strong evidence that greater TV viewing and shorter sleep are associated with poor outcomes, screen time interventions have the potential to improve sleep,” the researchers wrote.
Elizabeth M. Cespedes, SM, of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, and colleagues evaluated 1,864 children aged 6 months to nearly 8 years to determine the effects of TV exposures on sleep. Thirty-five percent of participants were racial/ethnic minorities.
During the study period, sleep duration decreased from 12.2 hours at aged 6 months to 9.8 hours per day at aged 7 years. TV viewing also increased from 0.9 hours to 1.6 hours per day.
Seventeen percent of participants aged 4 years had a TV in their bedroom compared with 23% at aged 7 years.
Researchers found that during the study period, each additional hour of TV viewing was associated with 7 fewer minutes of sleep per day. These effects appeared to be stronger among boys compared with girls. Minorities with a TV in their bedroom had a reduction of 31 minutes of sleep per day; however white, non-Hispanic children with a TV in their bedroom had a reduction of 8 minutes of sleep per day.
“Our study supports a negative influence of TV viewing and bedroom TV on children’s sleep,” the researchers wrote. “Although a comparison of within- and between-subject analyses suggests that associations previously reported by using cross-sectional data alone may have been inflated, we demonstrated that subgroups of young children, in particular, boys and racial/ethnic minorities, may be more vulnerable to TV’s effects on sleep.”
Disclosure: The study is funded in part by the NIH.
