Adolescent chronic sleep restriction promotes alcohol drinking in adulthood: evidence from epidemiological and preclinical data

Abstract

Study Objectives. Sleep disturbances during adolescence have been proposed as a contributing factor to the development of alcohol use disorder in adults. The purpose of this study was to test the longitudinal causal link between insufficient sleep and alcohol use by using epidemiological data and a controlled preclinical experiment. Methods. The epidemiological dataset included 5497 participants of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children cohort. Sleep and alcohol measures collected from interviews and questionnaires at 15 and 24 years of age were analyzed with multivariable linear regression and a cross-lagged autoregressive path model. Preclinical data were collected by sleep restricting Marchigian Sardinian alcohol preferring rats (n=40) from post-natal day 25 to 55 and measuring voluntary alcohol drinking concurrently and in adulthood. Polysomnography was used to validate the efficacy of the sleep restriction procedure. Behavioral tests were used to assess anxiety, risky behavior, and despair. Results. After adjusting for covariates, we found a cross-sectional association between all sleep parameters and alcohol consumption at 15 years of age but not at 24 years. Alcohol consumption (Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test for Consumption) at 24 years was predicted by insufficient sleep at 15 years whilst alcohol drinking at 15 years could not predict sleep problems at 24. Preclinically, adolescent chronic sleep restriction in rats escalated alcohol consumption during adolescence and led to higher alcohol drinking and increased propensity to risk-taking behavior in adulthood. Conclusions. Our findings support the longitudinal and causal association between adolescent insufficient sleep and higher adult alcohol consumption.