The researchers found that the difference in sleep in a quarter-hour was associated with measurable changes in brain structure and cognitive performance in adolescents.
The ancient battles between teenagers and parents on bedtime may have received strong scientific support. A pioneering study by researchers at the University of Cambridge and Fudan University shows that teenagers who sleep longer, even if only 15 minutes, show measurable advantages in brain structure, function, and cognitive performance.
The team used wearable technology to accurately track sleep patterns among more than 3,200 American adolescents and found three different sleep profiles, each associated with different levels of cognitive ability and brain development.
Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge highlighted the critical nature of these findings: “It often makes your sleep happy often while helping us function properly, but we know a lot about adulthood and later life, but we know nothing about teenage sleep, even though it is a crucial time in our development.”
The study, published today in Cell Reports, adopts a novel approach that may be inaccurate by using Fitbits to collect objective sleep data rather than relying on self-report. The researchers combined this data with brain scans and cognitive testing to provide unprecedented insights into the relationship between sleep patterns and brain development.
Perhaps most striking is that the slight differences in sleep duration are associated with significant differences in cognitive performance. Teens naturally fell into three groups, with an average sleep time of 7 hours and 10 minutes, 7 hours and 21 minutes and 7 hours and 25 minutes. Despite these seemingly small differences, the longest group consistently outperformed others in tests of vocabulary, reading, problem solving and attention.
“While our study cannot ultimately answer that young people have better brain function and perform better on tests because they sleep better, many studies support this idea.”
Besides sleep duration, sleep time has also proven to be important. The best performing group usually went to bed earlier, with a lower heart rate during sleep indicating better quality. The groups with the worst cognitive performance showed the opposite pattern – later beds, earlier wake-up times and higher heart rate during sleep.
Perhaps most worrying is that the groups failed to achieve the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep that suggests teenagers need, highlighting the widespread sleep deprivation among today’s teenagers.
The researchers also found that these sleep-related differences in brain structure and cognitive performance persisted over time, and two years later, the patterns established at ages 11-12 continued to show effect.
Dr. Wei Chen, a senior writer at Fudan University, raised an important question about the reasons for these sleep differences: “Given the importance of sleep, we now need to see why some children go to bed later rather than others.
As the nationwide debate later began, parents struggling on the technological boundaries, the study provides compelling evidence that even a small amount of improvements in sleep habits can bring significant benefits to adolescents’ brain development and academic performance.
The study was supported by China’s National Key R&D Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Postdoctoral Foundation of China and the Shanghai Postdoctoral Excellence Program, while the ABCD study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
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