Shorter Duration and Lower Quality Sleep Have Widespread Detrimental Effects on Developing Functional Brain Networks in Early Adolescence

Abstract

Sleep is critical for cognitive health, especially during complex developmental periods such as adolescence. However, its effects on maturating brain networks that support cognitive function are only partially understood. We investigated the impact of shorter duration and reduced quality sleep, common stressors during development, on functional network properties in early adolescence—a period of significant neural maturation, using resting-state fMRI from 5566 children (median age = 120.0 months; 52.1% females) in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) cohort. Decreased sleep duration, increased sleep latency, frequent waking up at night, and sleep-disordered breathing symptoms were associated with lower topological efficiency, flexibility, and robustness of visual, sensorimotor, attention, fronto-parietal control, default-mode and/or limbic networks, and with aberrant changes in the thalamus, basal ganglia, hippocampus and cerebellum (p < 0.05). These widespread effects, many of which were BMI-independent, suggest that unhealthy sleep in early adolescence may impair neural information processing and integration across incompletely developed networks, potentially leading to deficits in their cognitive correlates, including attention, reward, emotion processing and regulation, memory, and executive control. Shorter sleep duration, frequent snoring, difficulty waking up and daytime sleepiness had additional detrimental network effects in non-white participants, indicating racial disparities in the influence of sleep metrics.

Long-lasting effects of insufficient sleep on neurocognitive development in early adolescence

“…We first examined how baseline sleep duration influences the 42 baseline behavioral measurements that capture adolescence's problematic behaviors (e.g., conduct and psychosis, 20 items), cognitive functions (e.g., fluid and crystal intelligence, 10 items), and mental health (e.g., depression and anxiety, 12 items). Consistent with some previous findings, we found insufficient sleep had widespread impacts on these baseline behavioral measures (Brooks et al, 2021;Cheng et al, 2020). In particular, we found that 32 out of these 42 assessments showed a significant difference between SS and IS groups after propensity score matching on covariates (Figure 2A; p < .05, FDR corrected).…”

Parental religiosity is associated with changes in youth functional network organization and cognitive performance in early adolescence

“…Our cohort was selected based on availability and quality of the resting-state fMRI (data release 2.0.1), absence of clinical findings on structural MRI, and no history of bipolar disorder or ADHD, as both disorders that have been associated with aberrant functional connectivity 99 , 100 . The data quality criteria for inclusion are described in detail in 101 , 102 .…”

“…The fMRI data processing is described in detail in 101 , 102 . Briefly, neuroimaging data minimally preprocessed by the Data Analysis, Informatics & Resource Center (DAIRC) of the ABCD study 105 were further processed using our group’s Next Generation Neural Data Analysis platform (NGNDA) 106 .…”

Adenotonsillectomy for Snoring and Mild Sleep Apnea in Children

“…24 Deficits have been attributed to the effect of sleep loss, sleep fragmentation, and/or intermittent hypoxemia on the developing brain circuitry. [25][26][27] The current study focused on attention and executive function because of the potential sensitivity of the frontoparietal attentional network to sleep disruption. However, neither a direct performance measure of attention (GNG) nor a caregiver report of executive function (BRIEF) improved more with adenotonsillectomy.…”