Children's mental health is affected by sleep duration
February 4, 2020
Science Daily/University of Warwick
Depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour and poor cognitive performance in children is affected by the amount of sleep they have, researchers from the University of Warwick have found.
Sleep states are active processes that support reorganisation of brain circuitry. This makes sleep especially important for children, whose brains are developing and reorganizing rapidly.
In the paper 'Sleep duration, brain structure, and psychiatric and cognitive problems in children,' published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, 11,000 children aged 9-11 from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset had the relationship between sleep duration and brain structure examined by researchers Professor Jianfeng Feng, Professor Edmund Rolls, Dr. Wei Cheng and colleagues from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science and Fudan University.
Measures of depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour and poor cognitive performance in the children were associated with shorter sleep duration. Moreover, the depressive problems were associated with short sleep duration one year later.
Lower brain volume of brain areas involved the orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal and temporal cortex, precuneus, and supramarginal gyrus was found to be associated with the shorter sleep duration by using big data analysis approach.
Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science comments:
"The recommended amount of sleep for children 6 to 12 years of age is 9-12 hours. However, sleep disturbances are common among children and adolescents around the world due to the increasing demand on their time from school, increased screen time use, and sports and social activities.
A previous study showed that about 60% of adolescents in the United States receive less than eight hours of sleep on school nights.
"Our findings showed that the behaviour problems total score for children with less than 7 hours sleep was 53% higher on average and the cognitive total score was 7.8% lower on average than for children with 9-11 hours of sleep. It highlights the importance of enough sleep in both cognition and mental health in children."
Professor Edmund Rolls from the University of Warwick's Department of Computer Science also commented:
"These are important associations that have been identified between sleep duration in children, brain structure, and cognitive and mental health measures, but further research is needed to discover the underlying reasons for these relationships."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200204094726.htm
School-based sleep program may benefit adolescents
November 6, 2019
Science Daily/Wiley
A recent study uncovered potential long-term benefits of a school-based sleep education program for adolescents.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Sleep Research, included 3,622 adolescents, 286 in the intervention group and 3336 in the control group. Data were collected before the intervention and at a one-year follow-up.
The intervention consisted of five sessions, 50-60 minutes, once per week for six to seven weeks and was scheduled as part of students' school curriculum. Investigators divided participants into three groups according to baseline sleep duration: insufficient (less than seven hours), borderline (seven to eight hours) and adequate (more than eight hours). Adolescents in the intervention group were approximately two times less likely to report insufficient sleep at follow-up compared with controls. Sleep knowledge improved significantly in the intervention group but there were no changes in emotional sleep hygiene (such as bedtime worry) and perceived stress. Surprisingly, technology use increased and behavioral sleep hygiene worsened (for example, performing activities in bed that keep you awake) in the intervention group.
"These results are promising and mean that we might be able to prevent the development of sleep problems in youths," said lead author Serena V. Bauducco, PhD, of Örebro University, in Sweden. "More work needs to be done, however: we need to replicate these results and to understand what works. Therefore, we encourage future sleep intervention studies to investigate long-term outcomes -- after one year or even longer -- and to look for mechanisms of change."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191106085433.htm
Study affirms self-reported sleep duration as a useful health measure in children
Results show agreement between sleep measures reported by children and their parents
February 14, 2019
Science Daily/American Academy of Sleep Medicine
While sleep questionnaires are commonly completed by children and their parents, there has been a lack of data comparing the validity of these self-reported sleep parameters. A new study indicates that these sleep characteristics are relatively accurate compared to one another, and they vary only slightly from objective sleep measures.
Results show that when compared with objective sleep characteristics recorded during overnight polysomnography, there was strong agreement between both child report and parent report: Children overestimated their sleep duration by a median of 32 minutes, and parents overestimated their child's sleep duration by 36 minutes. Similarly, children overestimated the time it took them to fall asleep -- known as "sleep latency"- by four minutes, and parents overestimated their child's sleep latency by two minutes.
According to the authors, similar variances have been found in previous studies that used actigraphy to estimate sleep parameters in comparison with overnight polysomnography. In prior research, adults also have been found to overestimate their own sleep duration.
"Simple sleep measures such as sleep duration have been shown to be important predictors of health in children and adults," said Dr. Daniel Combs, lead author and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Arizona College of Medicine -- Tucson and Banner -- University Medical Center Tucson. "Our results suggest that while not perfect, parent or child report of sleep is a useful and very inexpensive tool to measure sleep in children."
The study results are published in the Jan. 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
The study involved 285 children in the Tucson Children's Assessment of Sleep Apnea community cohort study. They ranged in age from about 9 to 17 years, with a mean age of 13 years. Fifty-two percent of participants were boys, 68 percent were Caucasian, and 32 percent were Hispanic.
Objective measures were gathered using full polysomnography during one night of sleep at home. Children and their parents completed sleep questionnaires the following morning. Eighty-seven percent of parent questionnaires were filled out by mothers.
The authors noted that in cases with high disagreement between parent report and child report, the child report tended to be more accurate for sleep duration. In contrast, the parent report was more accurate for sleep latency.
The authors also performed a stratified analysis of children from 9 to 12 years of age, compared to children 13 to 17 years of age.
"We expected that for teenagers, parent report of sleep would be less accurate compared to parent report for younger children," said Dr. Combs. "Surprisingly, there was no difference in parent versus child report about sleep in teenagers."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190214093413.htm