Children’s Mental Health is Affected by Sleep Duration

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on MedicalXpress.

Depression, anxiety, impulsive behavior and poor cognitive performance in children is effected by the amount of sleep they have researchers from the University of Warwick have found.

Sleep states are active processes that support the reorganization of brain circuitry. This makes sleep especially important for children, whose brains are developing and reorganizing 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 from the University of Warwick’s Department of Computer Science and Fudan University.

Measures of depression, anxiety, impulsive behavior 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.

Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick’s Department of Computer Science, said “The recommended amount of sleep for children six to 12 years of age is nine to 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.

“Our findings showed that the behavior problems total score for children with less than seven 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.”

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-02-children-mental-health-affected-duration.html