The Effect of Digital Addiction Training on University Students' Digital Addiction, Sleep Quality, and Orexin-A Levels: Randomized Controlled Trial.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Orexin-A.

This study aimed to provide digital addiction training to university students, a population where digital addiction is more prevalent, and to investigate the effects of this training on their digital addiction levels, sleep quality, and orexin-A peptide levels.

Why It Was Studied

It disrupts the sleep-wake cycle and contributes to insomnia.

Orexins, also known as hypocretins, are peptides produced by neuronal cells in the brain.

Who Took Part

The study group was 21 participants.

PubMed indexes the participants as young adults and adults, both men and women.

This research was designed as a pre-test-post-test experimental study with a control group.

Based on power analysis, a total of 42 students were included in the study, with 21 participants in the intervention group and 21 participants in the control group.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

Because people in this Orexin-A study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Data were collected using a sociodemographic questionnaire, Digital Addiction Scale, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PUKI).

Blood samples were collected from students assigned to the intervention and control groups both before the training and to measure orexin-A levels.

The intervention group then participated in four sessions of combating digital addiction training.

Upon completion of the training program, both the intervention and control groups underwent a post-test, and their orexin-A levels were remeasured.

In the analysis of data, independent sample t-test, one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), Spearman and Pearson's correlation tests were used for correlation analyses.

What Was Measured

However, despite the potential link between orexin-A levels, digital addiction, and sleep quality, studies on this topic remain limited.

The subject headings attached to it are Orexins, Sleep Quality, Students, Universities, Internet Addiction Disorder and Behavior, Addictive.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Digital addiction, Digital addiction training and Orexin a.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Orexin-A in 21 participants.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 5 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2025 (BMC psychology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Orexin-A compound page, all human trials.