The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine
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Adolescents prefer sleep and wake times that are considerably delayed compared with younger children or adults. Concomitantly, multimedia use in the evening is prevalent among teenagers and involves light exposure, particularly in the blue-wavelength range to which the biological clock and its associated arousal promotion system is the most sensitive. We investigated whether the use of blue light-blocking glasses (BB) during the evening, while sitting in front of a light-emitting diode (LED) computer screen, favors sleep initiating mechanisms at the subjective, cognitive, and physiological level. ⋯ BB glasses may be useful in adolescents as a countermeasure for alerting effects induced by light exposure through LED screens and therefore potentially impede the negative effects modern lighting imposes on circadian physiology in the evening.