A new Swedish study states that a teenage girl may be unable to get off her smartphone or other devices.
Teenagers who spend extra time using screen get poor sleep in terms of sleep quality and duration – researchers have written in PLOS Global Public Health Journal on Wednesday.
Screen time also causes teenage sleep delays, for later hours, affects their sleep cycle, they found, according to UPI.
Researchers also found that these sleep disturbances are later associated with symptoms of depression in girls, but not in boys.
“We found that teenagers developed poor sleep habits over the time of screen time,” we concluded the research team led by a doctoral student Sebastian Hokbi at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “In turn, this increased the level of depression, especially among the girls.”
For studies, researchers tracked over 4,800 Swedish teenagers between the ages of 12 and 16 and collected the data on time during a year at three different points, signs of depression and screen time.
They found that the symptoms of depression among girls were more than doubled from boys, the gender differences that have been found in earlier studies, the researchers reported.
