Caffeine, Sleep Duration and Adolescents’ Perception of Health Related Quality of Life

Abstract

Introduction: The main objective of this study was to understand the impact of caffeine on adolescents' health and health related behaviours, namely sleep duration and health related quality of life. Methods: Students in the 6 th , 8 th and 10 th grades were chosen randomly from clusters of schools for this study. A questionnaire designed to measure caffeine consumption, sleep quantity and quality and health related quality of life was used.

Perception of quantity and quality of sleep and their association with health related quality of life and life satisfaction during adolescence

“…poorer as well as their reported life satisfaction [36][37][38]52,57,58]. As for the analyse of sleep parameters, although in some previous studies the sleep dimension under analyse was sleep deprivation (as stated for the difference between sleep duration on week days and weekends) and the present study focuses sleep duration and perception of sleep quality [16,[18][19][20]26,27], the present results confirm the importance of sleeping eight hours or more in the perception of wellbeing and life satisfaction during adolescence, this study adds to previous studies that not only the duration and the perception of a good quality of sleep are equally important, but that the pattern of association of these two parameters with health outcomes is similar, either considering HRQL/ KIDScreen-10 as a global score, either consider each of the 10 items individually. Although gender and age differences are often reported in the literature, in the present analysis even after adjusting for age, gender and health perception, both the number of sleeping hours and the perceived quality of sleep remained significant and positively correlated with HRQL/KIDScreen-10 score and life satisfaction , moreover this relation occurred significantly for all the single items of HRQL, positively whenever the item was positively oriented and negatively in the case of feeling sad and lonely.…”

“…These results are substantially important for sleep hygiene and for recommendations for adolescents, parents, health and education professionals and public policies. It is now widely recommended that adolescents must sleep at least 8 hours per night, what this study allow to recommend is that the perception of quality of that sleep is equally important for the perception of wellness and life satisfaction [1][2][3]17,18 ], and this leads to another set of recommendations for an adequate sleep hygiene, that include not exercising or practising sports in the evenings [5,21], avoiding conflicts at home in the evenings and not going to bed worried [61,62], not having caffeine and other energetic drinks in the evening [20], not abusing screen time after dinner or in bed [5,16,19]. This recommendations are important to assure sleep duration and perceived quality and therefore the perception of wellness and life satisfaction, having an additional impact on school satisfaction and academic success [16].…”

“…Several studies of children and adolescents have pointed out the relations of sleep duration with: daytime sleepiness [1][2][3], body mass index (BMI) [2,[4][5][6][7], type II diabetes and insulin resistance [8], sleep disorders [1], health characteristics [2], high blood pressure [9], pain [10][11][12], cognitive tests and academic success [3, [13][14][15][16], subjective psychological wellbeing [17,18], socioeconomic status [2,5], habits such as high screen or TV viewing time [5,16,19,20], low or moderate physical activity [5,21], poor dietary intake and quality [20,22], and risk-taking behaviours [19,[23][24][25][26][27][28]. Some studies considered not only the parameter sleep duration, but also sleep deprivation, considering sleep deprivation the difference between week-days sleep duration and week-ends sleep duration [16,18,19].…”

“…Healthy sleep is fundamental to human health and quality of life [39,40], and sleep deprivation increases the risk for mood and behavioural problems, such as drug and alcohol use and vulnerability to accidents [16][17][18][19][20][23][24][25][26]41].…”

“…Adolescents with poor sleeping patterns present lower scores on emotional, social, school, psychosocial functioning and poor global perception of quality of life, when compared with same age adolescents without poor sleeping patterns [16][17][18][19][20][43][44][45]. Those with delayed sleep phase disorders have higher trends for alcohol and caffeine consumption, and lower sports participation [46].…”