Let Them Sleep: AAP Recommends Later School Start Time for Teens

In a new policy statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends middle and high schools delay the start of class to 8:30 a.m. or later.

Doing so will align school schedules to the biological sleep rhythms of adolescents, whose sleep/wake cycles begin to shift up to two hours later at the start of puberty.

Studies have shown that delaying early school start times is one key factor that can help adolescents and teens get the sleep they need to grow and learn.

In this segment, Dr. Cora Collette Breuner discusses all the health benefits of proper sleep and how it can affect your child's schooling.
Let Them Sleep: AAP Recommends Later School Start Time for Teens
Featuring:
Cora Collette Breuner, MD, MPH
BreunerCorapix2012Dr. Cora Collette Breuner attended Medical School in Philadelphia at Jefferson Medical College with a Residency in San Diego at the Balboa Naval Hospital. She served as a transitional intern, consisting of six months internal medicine followed by six months of surgery training. Following this, Dr Breuner was the general medical officer on the destroyer tender, USS Acadia, homeported in San Diego. She entered a three-year pediatric residency, serving as Chief Resident the final year. She spent the next two years as a general pediatrician in Japan, where she volunteered as a pediatric consultant in Navy clinics throughout Japan and Korea. Dr. Breuner then spent a year working in Pakistan caring for Afghan refugees where she taught soldiers to be medics in their military and local communities.

Upon her return from Pakistan in 1991, Dr. Breuner began a two-year fellowship at Seattle Children's Hospital in Adolescent Medicine which she followed with a six-year stretch at Swedish Hospital teaching in the Family Medicine residency. During this time she received her Masters in Public Health from the University of Washington with a thesis focused on complementary medicine use in homeless youth.

She returned to the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital in 2000. She joined the faculty of the Orthopedic and Sports Medicine department in 2007. She is the current director of the Adolescent Eating Disorder Clinic, and is also the director of the Adolescent Biofeedback Clinic. She attends on the inpatient wards, covers West Seattle High School as the football team physician, teaches mind body medicine at the University of Washington to the second-year medical students and directs the complementary medicine elective for the medical students and pediatric residents. Her research focus has been on the education of medical students and residents on the integration of complementary medicine into allopathic care and on the use of yoga as an adjunctive intervention for the treatment of eating disorders.

She has many publications on the safety and efficacy of complementary and alternative medicine. She serves on the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Adolescent and writes board review questions for the American Academy of Pediatrics PREP series. Dr Breuner lectures all over the United States, Canada and Europe on a variety of topics including complementary and alternative medicine in pediatrics and on the adolescent patient and athlete. Finally she has three fabulous children, ages 16,19 and 21, and loves to travel, hike and go on adventures with her children and their dog.
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