Tired Teens More Prone to Injury

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

It’s common knowledge teens need a good night’s sleep to function well. But recent Brock University-led international research has raised the stakes on what could happen if their slumber is inadequate. The findings are published in the European Journal of Public Health.

“We observed a substantial risk of injury in adolescents who reported having poor sleep,” says Ph.D. student Valerie Pagnotta (BSc ’21, MSc ’23), lead author of the cross-national study “Sleep difficulties as a consistent risk factor for medically treated injuries among adolescents in 46 countries.”

The worse the quality and quantity of sleep, the greater the risk of any or multiple injuries, says Pagnotta. Girls with poor sleep were particularly vulnerable to being injured.

Using records from the World Health Organization’s ongoing Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey and involving multiple international investigators in the HBSC network, the research team surveyed 230,000 adolescents aged 11, 13 and 15 in Canada and 45 European countries.

Participants reported on their sleep behaviors, including how often they experienced difficulties falling asleep, insufficient quality and quantity of sleep on school and non-school days, and social jetlag, which refers to different sleep patterns during weekends and other non-school days.

Adolescents were also asked how often they had experienced an injury that required medical treatment from a doctor or nurse in the past year as well as if they had sustained a more serious injury that required a cast, stitches or surgery.

Adolescents reporting difficulties in falling asleep were at the highest risk of experiencing any, and multiple, injury in all countries, and girls displayed greater risks for one or more injuries compared to boys, regardless of the sleep indicator.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-teens-prone-injury.html