SUMMARY

In contemporary 24-hour society excessive sleepiness is increased in periods when one should be awake and alert, which can have serious implications for performance and safety in everyday activities. Two population groups have especially been affected: shift workers and adolescents.

The project deals with problem sleepiness in adolescents. The goal of the research is to understand problem sleepiness in adolescent population and to evaluate a public health program for prevention of sleepiness. The project proposes field and laboratory studies.

The field research will estimate prevalence of problem sleepiness, identify lifestyle factors and adolescents' characteristics that are related to sleepiness, examine relationship between indices of sleepiness, performance and safety, and determine temporal stability of sleepiness measures. A survey of 3000 adolescents (11-22 y) will be conducted measuring their characteristics, sleep, everyday habits, and their knowledge about sleep.

A sample of 30 adolescents will be recruited to the laboratory in order to examine relationship between their 24-hour activities over the school week and objective and subjective indices of sleepiness at the end of week.

The important contribution of this project is that it will study problem sleepiness in the context of a two-shift schedule of school time with schedule changing every week, since it has so far been studied in adolescents attending school only in the morning. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of educational interventions in changing adolescents' knowledge about sleep with the purpose of designing recommendations for preventive public health programs promoting principles of healthy sleep.