University of Pittsburgh’s Peter Franzen and Erika Forbes invited 35 participants, aged 11.5-15 years, into a sleep lab for two nights. Half the participants slept for 10 hours, while the other half slept only four hours. A week later, they came back to the lab for another two nights and adopted the opposite sleep schedule from their initial visit.<\/p>\n Each time they visited the lab, the participants underwent brain scans while playing a game that involved receiving monetary rewards of $10 and $1. At the end of each visit, the teens answered questions that measured their emotional functioning, as well as depression symptoms.<\/p>\n The researchers found that sleep deprivation affected the putamen<\/strong>, an area of the brain that plays a role in goal-based movements and learning from rewards<\/strong>. When participants were sleep-deprived and the reward in the game they played was larger, the putamen was less responsive. In the rested condition, the brain region didn’t show any difference between high- and low-reward conditions.<\/p>\n Franzen and Forbes also found connections between sleep restriction and mood: after a night of restricted sleep, the participants who experienced less activation in the putamen also reported more symptoms of depression. This is consistent with findings, from a large literature of studies on depression and reward circuitry, that depression is characterized by less activity in the brain’s reward system.<\/p>\n The results suggest that sleep deprivation in the tween and teen years may interfere with how the brain processes rewards<\/strong>, which could disrupt mood<\/strong> and put a person at risk of depression<\/strong>, as well as risk-taking behavior and addiction<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology press release: Chronic sleep deprivation — which can involve staying up late, and waking up early for work or school — has become a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[345,5,10,346],"tags":[21,42,14,49,158,93,236,362],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25119"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25299,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25119\/revisions\/25299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/DaytimeSleepiness.jpg\")
Chronic sleep deprivation<\/strong> — which can involve staying up late, and waking up early for work or school — has become a way of life for both kids and adults<\/strong>, especially with the increasing use of phones and tablets late into the night. But this social jet lag poses some serious health and mental health risks<\/strong>: new research finds that for teenagers, even a short period of sleep restriction could, over the long-term, raise their risk for depression and addiction<\/strong>.<\/p>\n