Research shows that gay teens are more than twice as likely to suffer from insomnia
Gay teens are more than twice as likely to have sleep problems compared to their heterosexual peers, a study suggests.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, surveyed 8,500 young people — including 374 gay teens — about how they slept.
About 35 percent of those in the LGBT group said they had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep in the past two weeks.
But among young people who said they were straight, only 13.5 percent reported the same problems.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, said LGBT youth had more trouble sleeping than their peers
The researchers state that LGBT youth are kept awake at night because of discrimination, bullying and conflicts at home.
Adolescence is a time of trouble sleeping because the body’s circadian rhythm — or internal clock — goes back a few hours.
Scientists say this is likely done to help teens learn independence, by letting them be awake while their parents sleep.
But in today’s modern world, with early school times and demanding homework schedules, the service ultimately disrupts young people’s sleep.
Teens need about eight to 10 hours of sleep per night — up to three hours more than adults — and nearly three in four fail to consistently get it.
Previous research has already pointed to sleep problems in sexual minorities.
But the scientists believe their paper is the first to identify it among LGBT youth.
In the study, published in the journal LGBT healthresearchers pulled research data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD study).
This study used advanced brain imaging to track brain growth in adolescents from 21 locations in the US from 2018 to 2020. It also included survey data from parents and their children on other lifestyle factors such as sleep and sexuality.
Researchers looked at data from 8,500 young people between the ages of 10 and 14.
A total of 7,484 reported being straight, while another 376 said they were gay and 325 said they might be gay.
The results showed that a total of 15 percent of participants — or one in six — said they had trouble sleeping.
Analysis showed that LGBT youth were 124 percent more likely to struggle with sleep than straight youth.
The researchers called for more interventions to help LGBT youth, including fostering acceptance in families and schools.
They concluded: ‘In summary, our results indicate that sexual minority status may be associated with sleep problems in early adolescence.
“Depressive problems, stress, less parental supervision and more family conflict mediate in part in inequalities in sleep health for youth from sexual minorities.
“Interventions to promote family and caregiver acceptance and mental health support for sexual minority youth may have the potential to improve their sleep and other health outcomes.”
Limitations of the study include that it relied on self-reported sleep patterns, which may be subject to memory bias.