Abstract
Background and aims: Everybody recognizes the importance of good sleep habits, but this is not an easy issue to get the agreement of adolescents. The schedules are not the best and even the quality of sleep can be poor, with the consequences during daytime performances.
Methods: An annonymous questionnaire was applied to 705 high school students of Viana do Castelo, Portugal.
Results: The median age is 16 years and 54% are females. At week, the median age that they go to bed is 23:00 and on the weekend is 1:00. They wake up at 7:20 (median) at the week and on the weekend at 10:00. Fifty-four percent recognize they don't sleep enough time at week, mainly because of television (35%), but 69% think they sleep enough on the weekend. Fifty-three percent recognize that their school performance could be better if they slept more and only 22% feel rarely or never sleepy during the day. Twenty-eight percent admit to suffer from insomnia. Fourteen percent admit to go out at night more than once a week and 57% more than once per weekend. Sixty percent have a television on the bedroom and 48% a computer. Only 7% sleep the SESTA at week and 11% on the weekend.
Conclusions: We conclude that adolescents' sleeping patterns are not the healthier ones and it can influence their school performance, as they do admit it. The quality of the sleep can even be worsened by the presence of the television and the computer in the bedroom.
Log in or create a free account to read this content
Gain free access to this article, as well as selected content from this journal and more on nature.com
or
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rodrigues, H., Martins, S., Salgado, M. et al. 544 Sleep Patterns in a Portuguese Adolescent Population. Pediatr Res 68 (Suppl 1), 279 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-201011001-00544
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-201011001-00544
