- Sleep states are an active process that support reorganisation of brain circuitry, and this is essential for children whose brains are developing and reorganising rapidly.

- Children with shorter sleep duration were associated with depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour and poor cognitive performance researchers at the University of Fudan have found.

- Children aged 9-11 years old who sleep for less than seven hours were 53% more likely to have behavioural problems compared to those who have 9-11 hours’ sleep.

Depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour and poor cognitive performance in children is affected by the amount of sleep they have researchers from the University of Fudan have found.

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

In the paper ‘Sleep duration, brain structure, and psychiatric and cognitive problems in children.’ published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, 11,000 children aged 9-11 from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset had the relationship between sleep duration and brain structure examined by researchers Professor Jianfeng Feng, Professor Edmund Rolls, Dr. Wei Cheng and colleagues.

Measures of depression, anxiety, impulsive behaviour and poor cognitive performance in the children were associated with shorter sleep duration. Moreover, the depressive problems were associated with short sleep duration one year later. The results were found based upon association studies, not causal studies.

Lower brain volume of brain areas involved the orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal and temporal cortex, precuneus, and supramarginal gyrus was found to be associated with the shorter sleep duration by using big data analysis approach.

Professor Jianfeng Feng comments:

"The recommended amount of sleep for children 6 to 12 years of age is 9-12 hours. However, sleep disturbances are common among children and adolescents around the world due to the increasing demand on their time from school, increased screen time use, and sports and social activities."

"A previous study showed that about 60% of adolescents in the United States receive less than eight hours of sleep on school nights.Our findings showed that the behaviour problems total score for children with less than 7 hours sleep was 53% higher on average and the cognitive total score was 7.8% lower on average than for children with 9-11 hours of sleep. It highlights the importance of enough sleep in both cognition and mental health in children.We have to stress here that the results were found based upon association studies, but not causal studies",he added.

Professor Edmund Rolls also comments:

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

ENDS

Paper available to view: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-020-0663-2