A study recommends a minimum of 9 hours of sleep for children between 9 and 12 years old

by time news

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine suggests at least 9 hours of sleep per day for children ages 6 to 12, but children in later generations often report getting less than this amount of sleep. Because early adolescence is a crucial period for neurocognitive development, the aim of The Lancet was to investigate how lack of sleep affects children’s mental health, cognition, brain function and brain structure over 2 years.

Method

In this study, Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD), researchers obtained data from a population-based sample of children ages 9-10 from 21 US sites. Participants were classified as having sufficient or insufficient sleep based on a limit of 9 hours of sleep per day.

Using propensity score matching, they matched these two groups of participants in 11 covariables clave, including gender, socioeconomic status, and puberty status. They excluded participants who failed an initial resting-state functional MRI quality check or had missing data for the covariates involved.

The results of the ABCD study were behavioral problems, mental health, cognition, and structural and resting-state functional brain measures, evaluated at baseline and at 2-year follow-up. They examined group differences in these outcomes over those 2 years among all eligible participants. They then did a mediation analysis of the neural correlates of sleep deprivation-induced behavioral changes.

Between September 1, 2016 and October 15, 2018, baseline data for the ABCD study were collected from 11,878 people, of whom 8,323 were elected and included in this study (4142 participants in the sufficient sleep group and 4181 in the insufficient sleep group). Follow-up data was collected from July 30, 2018, to January 15, 2020. They identified 3,021 matched sleep-insufficient sleep pairs at baseline and 749 matched pairs at 2-year follow-up, and observed similar differences between groups on behavior and neural measures at both time points. They found that functional connections of the corticobasal ganglia mediate the effects of insufficient sleep on depression, thinking problems, and crystallized intelligence, and that structural properties of the anterior temporal lobe mediate the effect of insufficient sleep on crystallized intelligence.

Interpretation

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

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