Sleepless teens likelier to get obese: study.

ISLAMABAD -- A new study has demonstrated that teenagers who get less than six hours of sleep a night might be at risk of being obese as compared to their peers who sleep more than eight hours.

Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health showed that teenagers had a high risk of being obese by age 21 and its was 20 percent higher among 16-year-olds who slept less than six hours, said the study published in Journal of Pediatrics.

Shakira F. Suglia, ScD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School, said that lack of sleep in teenage years could stack the deck against...