A Longitudinal Study on Internet Addiction’s Effect on Health Among Adolescents

Abuse of internet networks might result in internet addiction (IA), which associates with impairment to reward processing systems and is able to harm the human body both physically and mentally. Addiction to the internet among adolescents and the effects brought by this is one of the areas where a lot of researchers put efforts in. In this paper, a designed longitudinal study exploring this topic is presented. More than 10 participants from 13 years old to 19 years with considerable internet using the time (spending more than 2 hours on the internet that were not focused on schoolwork) are selected. Questionnaires and surveys are designed or prepared to theoretically diagnose participants' mental stasis and inspect their tendencies of becoming psychologically or mentally sicked once a month. Also, a thorough physical examination will be made once a month to participants to test the internet addiction's effects on participants' physical health. Based on previous researches and investigations, researchers discovered that people with Internet addiction are highly associated with diseases like anxiety, depression, and ADHD, etc. It also increases the risk to risk factors of the cardiovascular system and, negatively affects sleeping quality, which is essential to "memory, learning, concentration and emotional balance".