Abstract
The adverse effects of sleep deprivation on athletic performance are widely accepted, especially among sports requiring motor coordination, tactical decision-making, and aerobic physical exertion. However, there is limited research assessing the real-world effects (e.g., points scored) of sleep deprivation on elite athletes. We combined two publicly available databases to assess the association between late-night tweeting behavior and next-day performance among 90 National Basketball Association (NBA) players. Twitter© account activity was obtained using the Twitter REST API, while Yahoo Sports (Inc.) provided statistics from NBA players during in-season games. Starting from a set of 581,190 tweets on Twitter’s NBA-related list, we filtered the dataset down to 19,705 tweets from verified Twitter accounts from real NBA players with who played in recent seasons, between 2009–2016. We focused on East Coast teams playing on the East Coast to avoid the potentially confounding effects of prolonged travel and jetlag on tweeting behavior and performance. Late-night tweets were defined as those occurring between 11:00 pm on the night prior to gameday and 7:00 am on gameday. Performance variables included total points scored, shooting percentage, assists, defensive rebounds, turnovers and player fouls. Within-subjects analysis was performed. Preliminary analyses show that late-night tweeting was associated with fewer points scored per game (8.2 vs. 9.2, p<0.01) and a lower shooting percentage for both field goals (36% vs. 41%, p<0.01) and free throws (39% vs. 44%, p<0.01). Planned additional analyses include assists, defensive rebounds, turnovers and player fouls. Late-night tweeting behavior among a relatively large cohort of professional basketball players across multiple seasons is significantly associated with decreased next-day performance. Furthermore, the use of Twitter account activity may have broad utility as a readily accessible tool in the investigation of sleep deprivation in a variety of epidemiological contexts. R01HD073352 (L. Hale, PI).
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