Night awakening in infancy: Developmental stability and longitudinal associations with psychomotor development.

Abstract

Fragmented sleep is common in infancy. Although night awakening is known to decrease with age, in some infants night awakening is more persistent and continues into older ages. However, the influence of fragmented sleep on development is poorly known. In the present study, the longitudinal relationship between fragmented sleep and psychomotor development (Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development [Bayley-III]; Bayley, 2009) was investigated in infants with (≥3 night awakenings, n = 81) and without fragmented sleep (≤1 night awakening, n = 70) within the CHILD-SLEEP birth cohort at 8 and 24 months of age. Differences in parent-reported (Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire [BISQ]) sleep parameters were studied at 8, 18, and 24 months of age. Group differences in night awakening were stable across all assessment points. Infants with fragmented sleep slept less in total than infants without fragmented sleep and they did not compensate their nocturnal sleep during daytime. Additionally, infants with fragmented sleep spent more time awake at night than infants without fragmented sleep. However, psychomotor development did not differ between infants with and without fragmented sleep at 8 or 24 months of age. Our findings indicate that early onset fragmented sleep did not have a negative effect on psychomotor development within the first 2 years despite the differences in sleep length among infants with and without fragmented sleep. In the future, more specific domains of cognitive development and various factors affecting sleep fragmentation should be taken into account when studying the developmental effects of night awakening in infancy. (PsycINFO Database Record

Normal sleep development in infants: findings from two large birth cohorts

“…Therefore, night awakenings are a normative feature for children under one year of age. This is supported by recent studies in which the number of night awakenings and staying awake at night (<age 1 yr) were not associated with adverse developmental consequences (Mäkelä et al 2018;Pennestri et al, 2018). However, during the second year, the average number of night-awakenings decreased significantly.…”

Night Awakening and Its Association With Executive Functioning Across the First Two Years of Life

“…The eye-tracking data of the Switch task were saved as text files and analyzed with gazeAnaly-sisLib, a library of Matlab routines for gaze data analysis (Lepp€ anen, Forssman, Kaatiala, Yrttiaho, & Wass, 2015). The areas of interest were manually defined, and these areas covered the central area of the screen, the rectangle where the monkey appeared, and the area between the center and the rectangle.…”

“…The average numbers of scorable trials in the pre and postswitch blocks were 4.3 and 3.9, respectively, with no difference between the blocks (t(236) = 1.477, p = .141). The correlations between video-based (i.e., manually coded) and eye-tracking data from children saccadic response tasks have been shown to be very high (Lepp€ anen et al, 2015).…”

Longitudinal links between maternal factors and infant cognition: Moderation by infant sleep

“…However, these studies have yielded mixed findings. Whereas some studies did not observe correlations between different aspects of sleep and overall cognitive functioning (Mäkelä et al, ; Mindell & Lee, ; Spruyt et al, ), other studies have yielded divergent patterns of results. For example, one study on a small sample of low‐risk infants found that more motor activity in sleep and more fragmented sleep were associated with lower mental developmental index (MDI) scores at 10 months (Scher, ).…”

“…However, links between infant sleep and cognitive functioning are less well understood. Several studies (e.g., Mäkelä et al, ; Scher, ) have examined the relations between various aspects of sleep and performance on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (Bayley, , ), a standardized assessment that captures infant functioning across multiple cognitive domains (e.g., sensorimotor development, exploration and manipulation, memory). Other studies have relied on maternal report measures of infants’ cognitive functioning (e.g., Mindell & Lee, ).…”