Effects of sleep duration on neurocognitive development in early adolescents in the USA: a propensity score matched, longitudinal, observational study

Background

Although the American Academy of Sleep Medicine suggests at least 9 h of sleep per day for 6–12-year-olds, children in recent generations often report sleeping less than this amount. Because early adolescence is a crucial period for neurocognitive development, we aimed to investigate how insufficient sleep affects children's mental health, cognition, brain function, and brain structure over 2 years.

Methods

In this propensity score matched, longitudinal, observational cohort study, we obtained data from a population-based sample of 9–10-year-olds from 21 US study sites in the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Participants were categorised as having sufficient sleep or insufficient sleep on the basis of a cutoff of 9 h sleep per day. Using propensity score matching, we matched these two groups of participants on 11 key covariates, including sex, socioeconomic status, and puberty status. Participants were excluded from our analysis if they did not pass a baseline resting-state functional MRI quality check or had missing data for the covariates involved in propensity score matching. Outcome measures retrieved from the ABCD study were behavioural problems, mental health, cognition, and structural and resting-state functional brain measures, assessed at baseline and at 2-year follow-up. We examined group differences on these outcomes over those 2 years among all eligible participants. We then did mediation analyses of the neural correlates of behavioural changes induced by insufficient sleep.

Findings

Between Sept 1, 2016, and Oct 15, 2018, 11 878 individuals had baseline data collected for the ABCD study, of whom 8323 were eligible and included in this study (4142 participants in the sufficient sleep group and 4181 in the insufficient sleep group). Follow-up data were collected from July 30, 2018, to Jan 15, 2020. We identified 3021 matched sufficient sleep–insufficient sleep pairs at baseline and 749 matched pairs at 2-year follow-up, and observed similar differences between the groups in behaviour and neural measures at both timepoints; the effect sizes of between-group differences in behavioural measures at these two timepoints were significantly correlated with each other (r=0·85, 95% CI 0·73–0·92; p<0·0001). A similar pattern was observed in resting-state functional connectivity (r=0·54, 0·45–0·61; p<0·0001) and in structural measures (eg, in grey matter volume r=0·61, 0·51–0·69; p<0·0001). We found that cortico–basal ganglia functional connections mediate the effects of insufficient sleep on depression, thought problems, and crystallised intelligence, and that structural properties of the anterior temporal lobe mediate the effect of insufficient sleep on crystallised intelligence.

Interpretation

These results provide population-level evidence for the long-lasting effect of insufficient sleep on neurocognitive development in early adolescence. These findings highlight the value of early sleep intervention to improve early adolescents' long-term developmental outcomes.

Funding

National Institutes of Health.