Simulatore d'alba come possibile contromisura al social jetlag in adolescenza

The main goal of the present research project was to verify if the non-clinical use of the dawn simulator (i.e., a lamp that emits light that gradually increases before the morning awakening), based on a specific chronobiological knowledge, could reduce some of the social jetlag's consequences in high school students. To this end, the effects of dawn simulator have been assessed on the following features: mood and activation (assessed subjectively through the Global Vigor and Affect Scale-GVA), quality and quantity of sleep (assessed both objectively and subjectively through actigraphy and Mini Sleep Questionnaire-MSQ, respectively), sleep architecture (assessed objectively through Zeo®), and efficiency of the three attentional networks (alerting, orienting and executive) assessed through the Attention Network Test (ANT). On the whole, 56 adolescents (24 females and 32 males) took part to the study and their mean age was 17.68 years (age ranging between 15 and 20 years); they were attending two high schools in the city of Cesena (Emilia-Romagna, Italy). Each adolescent was requested to participate for five consecutive weeks and the research design included the following three experimental conditions: baseline, dawn simulator and control. As regards the MSQ, after the use of dawn simulator, it was observed a lower perception of diurnal sleepiness, less nighttime awakenings and a lower number of participants with a bad wake quality. At the ANT, the efficiency of the alerting network improved subsequent to the use of dawn simulator, because participants were more alerted after the appearance of the double cue, that preceded the target (i.e., a centrally presented arrow of which participants had to identify the direction). Overall the present results show that the dawn simulator is able to determine an activating/alerting effect and thus it may be considered like a tool potentially usable as a countermeasure for social jetlag in adolescence.