How Does Sleep Deprivation Affect College Students

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Overweight and obesity have become epidemic in the United States. Sleep deprivation has also become an epidemic. One population that these epidemics have affected is the college population. There are about 27 million students enrolled in colleges across the country. Therefore the relationship between sleep and obesity is multifaceted and related by way of environmental factors as well as personal decisions brought about by the college lifestyle. Interactions between light and melatonin and their affect on wakefulness, as well as interactions between ghrelin and leptin and their affect on human appetite come to relate to one another in the human body giving us a better idea of what the bodies of college students are going through. In addition …show more content…
Within the objective there are main focuses to increase the proportion of adults who get sufficient sleep, with 30 percent of US adults not getting sufficient sleep (Healthy People 2020) It is well known assumption that college students are greatly affected by sleep deprivation. Sleep insufficiency is a condition in which an individual does not get a satisfactory amount of sleep in accordance with the activities they do on a daily basis. In the case of college students sleep insufficiency affects their mental and physical health. Overweight and obesity is national epidemic that affects college students. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of 2010, it was estimated that about 12.5 million children and 78 million American adults were obese. Also as of 2010, 69.0 percent of adults aged 20 and over who are either overweight or obese is 69.0 percent, up from 54.9 percent in 1998. In adolescents, those between the ages of 12 and 19, 20.5 percent were obese compared to 14.8 in 1999. (CDC) Obesity rates in America have doubled since 1970 (Hammond and Levine, …show more content…
Since then it has become common knowledge that sleep disorders are highly prevalent in our society and that further research needed to be done to understand and manage these disorders. After the discovery of the dual nature of sleep, researchers focused more on the relationship between sleep and physiological changes in terms of hormonal and metabolic activity (Dement, 1998). Activity of growth hormone in the body has been directly associated with sleep. Growth hormone secretion is shown to be dependent on sleep duration and sleep quality. Growth hormone levels decrease in periods of sleep deprivation. An association between sleep debt and the hormones leptin and ghrelin has also been established (Knutson et al, 2007). In 1999, Kojima M et al discovered the hormone ghrelin. Ghrelin has many purposes in the body, one of them being to increase hunger. Ghrelin is produced in the gastrointestinal tract and signals to the brain that the body needs to eat. Its production tends to increase before regular meal times and it is decreased after food is eaten (Klok M.D. et al). In 1994 Friedman et al discovered the hormone leptin, which was found to be a hormone that satiated hunger. Leptin is produced by adipose tissue and is released into the
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