Check out an interesting study that upends common myths around melatonin, weekends, or school start times.
As a new school year begins, Harvard-affiliated sleep health researchers have a message for parents and caregivers on teenage sleep: you’re wrong.
Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital enlisted experts in adolescent sleep to identify myths. In their new paper, published in Sleep Health, the authors explore the prevalence of each myth and present counterevidence to clarify what’s best for health.
Read the full story below and let us know your thoughts!
Really click-bait-y thread title is my thought.
The study doesn’t upend anything. The designation of these beliefs as myths was done by previous studies. This study just surveyed parents to find out which sleep myths are most prevalent.
I clicked waiting to learn something new about adolescent sleep, but I already knew that all the myths were myths.
However, the designation as “myth” that melatonin supplements are safe for adolescents is dubious. While there aren’t any long-term studies, there is no reason to believe that melatonin is unsafe for teens. In this study it says:
“While short-term clinical trials and outcome studies of exogenous melatonin administration for insomnia have demonstrated efficacy and have not thus far reported serious adverse events, longer-term studies are currently lacking. In particular, concerns have been raised about the known effects of melatonin on pubertal development that have been shown in animal studies.”
Those animal studies don’t even show that because they were done in ADULT hamster (in 1976) and rat (in 1963). That’s a reeeeal stretch.
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