Depriving yourself from sleep can be a forerunner for major depression especially among adolescents.
A genetic study of 1,788adult twins and a community based study of adolescents both have found a link between sleep duration and depression.
One major reason of depression is genetic, but the study found that both short and excessively long sleep durations appear to activate genes related to depressive symptoms.
Among twins with normal sleep duration of seven to 8.9 hours per night, the total heritability of depressive symptoms was 27 percent.
The genetic influence enlarged to 53 percent among twins with shorter sleep duration of just five hours a night and 49 percent among those who reported sleeping 10 hours a night.
Another study of 4,175 individuals between 11 and 17 years of age is the first to document that sleeping six hours or less a night increases the risk for major depression, which in turn increases the menace for decreased sleep among adolescents using prospective data.
The studies are published in the journal Sleep, is published online by the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC, a joint venture of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.
Healthy sleep is a requisite for physical, mental, and emotional well-being,” said American Academy of Sleep Medicine President Dr. M. Safwan Badr. “This new research emphasizes that we can make an investment in our health by prioritizing sleep.”
“We were surprised that the heritability of depressive symptoms in twins with very short sleep was nearly twice the heritability in twins sleeping normal amounts of time,” said Nathaniel Watson, associate professor of neurology and co-director of the University of Washington Medicine Sleep Centre in Seattle.
This new research call attention to make an investment in our health by prioritizing sleep, said M. Safwan Badr, president, American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
According to Robert E. Roberts, principal investigator Robert E. Roberts, Ph.D., professor of behavioral sciences, School of Public Health at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas, “sleep disturbance and hours of sleep should be part of the medical history of adolescents to ascertain risk”.
