From the Cover: Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep,circadian timing,and next-morning alertness

In the past 50 y, there has been a decline in average sleep duration and quality, with adverse consequences on general health. A representative survey of 1,508 American adults recently revealed that 90% of Americans used some type of electronics at least a few nights per week within 1 h before bedtime. Mounting evidence from countries around the world shows the negative impact of such technology use on sleep. This negative impact on sleep may be due to the short-wavelength–enriched light emitted by these electronic devices, given that artificial-light exposure has been shown experimentally to produce alerting effects, suppress melatonin, and phase-shift the biological clock. A few reports have shown that these devices suppress melatonin levels, but little is known about the effects on circadian phase or the following sleep episode, exposing a substantial gap in our knowledge of how this increasingly popular technology affects sleep. Here we compare the biological effects of reading an electronic book on a light-emitting device (LE-eBook) with reading a printed book in the hours before bedtime. Participants reading an LE-eBook took longer to fall asleep and had reduced evening sleepiness, reduced melatonin secretion, later timing of their circadian clock, and reduced next-morning alertness than when reading a printed book. These results demonstrate that evening exposure to an LE-eBook phase-delays the circadian clock, acutely suppresses melatonin, and has important implications for understanding the impact of such technologies on sleep, performance, health, and safety.The use of electronic devices for reading, communication, and entertainment has greatly increased in recent years. Greater portability, convenience, and ease of access to reading materials in electronic form add to the popularity of these devices. The use of light-emitting devices immediately before bedtime is a concern because light is the most potent environmental signal that impacts the human circadian clock and may therefore play a role in perpetuating sleep deficiency (1). The circadian-timing system synchronizes numerous internal physiological and biochemical processes, including the daily rhythm of sleep propensity (2), to external environmental time cues. For optimal sleep duration and quality, the timing of the sleep episode must be appropriately aligned with the timing of the circadian clock. In humans, exposure to light in the evening and early part of the night, even at low intensity, suppresses the release of the sleep-facilitating hormone melatonin (3–5) and shifts the circadian clock to a later time (3, 6), both of which make it more difficult to fall asleep at night. Light exposure in the biological evening/night also acutely increases alertness (7, 8), but not much is known about its impact on alertness the following day. Here we present results from a randomized study comparing the effects of reading before bedtime using a light-emitting eReader (LE-eBook) with reading a printed book by reflected light. We examined circadian timing and suppression of melatonin, polysomnographic (PSG) recordings of sleep, and subjective and objective measures of sleepiness both in the evening while reading and the following morning.