Photic countermeasures may be flexibly and scalably implemented to support sleep-wake health including manipulations of light intensity, spectra, duration and delivery modality across multiple contexts. While home lighting in the evening can suppress melatonin secretion and delay circadian phase, the patterning of light exposure across the day and evening can have moderating effects. This narrative review describes evidence that reduced light exposure during the school day delays the circadian clock, and longer exposure durations to light-emitting electronic devices in the evening suppress melatonin. Developmental changes in sleep-wake physiology suggest that such light exposure patterns may be particularly disruptive for adolescents and further compounded by lifestyle factors such as early school start times. This lighting schedule promotes chronic disruption to circadian physiology resulting in a myriad of impairments. For many people, daily light exposure is fundamentally dysregulated with reduced light during the day and increased light into the late evening. Light is a potent circadian entraining agent. Finally, we highlight emerging technologies that could be used to measure the ALAN exposure for epidemiological studies, and how spatial analytical methods, such as geographically weighted regression and spatial autoregressive models can be leveraged to understand the spatial and temporal characteristics of ALAN and its mechanisms in regulating human physiology and behavior. We also summarize the methodological approaches that have been used to analyze the spatial distribution of ALAN, as well as the relationships between ALAN and various adverse health outcomes. We review and summarize the pros and cons of different methods that have been used to quantify the light exposure in epidemiological settings, which include widely used remote sensing data, interview data, and individual-level wearable and handheld equipment. ALAN exposure measurements, however, vary from study to study and each measurement method has strengths and weaknesses. Artificial light at night (ALAN) has become an increasingly important topic in epidemiology as numerous studies have established a relationship between ALAN and adverse health effects, including cancer, obesity, depression, and sleep disruption.
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