Children's mental health affected by length of sleep

"Shorter sleep duration can increase the risk of children developing depression, anxiety and cognitive problems."

Depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviors and poor cognitive performance in children are affected by the amount of sleep they found researchers at the University of Warwick (Professor Jianfeng Feng, Professor Edmund Rolls, Dr Wei Cheng and colleagues in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick and Fudan University)

“Sleep states are active processes that support the reorganisation of brain circuitry. This makes sleep especially important for children, whose brains are developing and reorganizing rapidly.".

In the article published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, 11,000 children aged 9 to 11 from the “Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development” data set, they investigated the relationship between sleep duration and brain structure.

The study showed that children who regularly suffered from sleep disturbances or shorter sleep periods had reduced brain volume in the orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal cortex, precuneus, supramarginal gyrus, and temporal cortex.

Measures of depression, anxiety, impulsive behavior, and poor cognitive performance in children were associated with shorter sleep duration. In addition, the depressive problems were associated with a short duration of sleep a year later.

Professor Jianfeng Feng, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, comments:

“The recommended amount of sleep for children 6 to 12 years old is 9 to 12 hours. However, sleep disturbances are common in children and adolescents around the world due to the increasing demand for time spent in school, increased use of screen time, and sports and social activities. "

A previous study showed that about 60% of teens in the United States get less than eight hours of sleep on nights after school:

“Our results showed that the total behavior problem score for children with less than 7 hours of sleep was on average 53% higher and the total cognitive score was 7.8% lower on average than for children with 9 to 11 hours of sleep. This highlights the importance of getting enough sleep for cognition and mental health in children. "

Professor Edmund Rolls from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick:

"These are important associations that have been identified between sleep duration in children, brain structure, and measures of cognitive and mental health, but more research is needed to uncover the underlying reasons for these relationships.

Source: University of Warwick

Original Research: “Sleep duration, brain structure, and psychiatric and cognitive problems in children”. Wei Cheng, Edmund Rolls, Weikang Gong, Jingnan Du, Jie Zhang, Xiao-Yong Zhang, Fei Li & Jianfeng Feng. Molecular Psychiatry doi:10.1038/s41380-020-0663-2.