Too much texting: For many teens, phone messaging is a 24/7 activity
To many adults, text messaging is an enigma - a practice their teens engage in when they could just make a phone call or walk down the street to their friends' houses.
What most don't know is that too much texting can actually be detrimental to their teens' health - and not because of overworked fingers and thumbs. It's because new technologies give teens easy access to their friends 24 hours a day, even when they should be sleeping.
"The more technology we develop, the more we rely on technology," said Dr. Myrza Perez, a pediatric pulmonologist at Capital Allergy and Respiratory Disease Centers in Roseville and Folsom, Calif. A specialist in sleep disorders, she says that "before technology, we went to sleep when the sun went down. Now, with all these distractions, teenagers alone in their rooms stay up to extremely late hours on their cell phones and computers. Their parents have no idea."
The trend of sleep deprivation is leading to many daytime problems for teenagers, including headaches, impaired concentration, weakened immune systems, crankiness, increased use of nicotine or caffeine and hyperactive behavior often misconstrued as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
These symptoms are often interpreted by doctors as problems meriting medication, when in fact the best cure might be to turn off their cell phones at night.
Mikaela Espinoza, 17, always used to sleep with her phone at her bedside, just in case a friend called or text-messaged her in the middle of the night. Sometimes, she said, she would receive calls or messages as late as 3 a.m. - and she would wake right up to call or text right back.
"Whenever I'd hear my phone ring I would just wake up and answer it," Espinoza said. "I think a whole bunch of kids text all night long."
Espinoza soon found herself suffering from near-debilitating migraine headaches throughout the day. She couldn't concentrate in school, she couldn't go out with her friends, she couldn't be herself, she said.
Her primary physician's first instinct was to check her eyes. When that yielded no solutions, he sent her in for a CT scan. It came back clear.
"Nobody knew what was wrong with me," Espinoza said.
Eventually, Espinoza was diagnosed with a condition growing more and more common among teenagers: too much texting.
"After they realized I wasn't getting enough sleep, they told me I needed to turn off my phone or have it taken away from me at night," she said. "My mom was real mad at me."
According to the National Sleep Foundation, school-age children and adolescents need at least nine hours of sleep a night. But in a national survey conducted in 2006, only 20 percent of American teens said they get nine hours a night. Nearly half sleep less than eight hours on school nights, and 28 percent of high-school students reported falling asleep in school at least once a week.
The problem, experts estimate, has only worsened since then.
Cell phones are not the only culprits of sleep deprivation, Perez said. Video games and computers contribute to teenagers' inclination to stay up all night.
"Cell phones, computer screens and even televisions emit light rays that keep you awake," Perez said. "Light automatically stimulates the retinas. Before bed, people should turn off those devices and switch to a quieter, healthier activity, like reading."
Dr. Amer Khan, a pediatric neurologist who practices at Sutter Roseville Medical Center and Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento, Calif., said part of the problem lies in an all-around ignorance of sleep disorders, one of his specialties.
"Sleep problems are often masked and hidden behind daytime problems," Khan said. "The patients don't realize it's a sleep problem, and their physicians don't realize it's a sleep problem, so they get treated and diagnosed as daytime problems when that's not the case."