Increasing the amount of sleep adolescents get each night may reduce the prevalence of adolescent obesity, according to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Results of the study show that fewer hours of sleep are associated with greater increases in adolescent body mass index for teens 14 to 18 years old. The findings suggest that increasing the number of hours a teen sleeps to 10 hours a day, especially for those in the upper half of the BMI distribution, could help reduce the prevalence of adolescent obesity.
