Abstract
Earlier age of puberty has detrimental consequences for many aspects of health. Here, for the first time, we assessed the association of earlier puberty with sleep duration observationally and with validation using Mendelian Randomization. In the “Children of 1997” birth cohort (n = 8,327), we used adjusted multivariable logistic regression to assess the associations of each clinically assessed marker of earlier puberty with self-report sleep duration in adolescence. Using two-sample MR, we assessed the effect of earlier puberty timing based on 203 single nucleotide polymorphisms applied to genome wide association studies of sleep duration in adults (n = 335,410). In “Children of 1997”, cross-sectionally, older age of menarche was associated with longer (9+ hours) sleep duration [odds ratio (OR) 1.11, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.01 to 1.21] at 13.5 years. The other earlier puberty markers were unrelated to sleep duration. Using inverse variance weighting, later of age at menarche increased adult sleep duration [0.020 per category, 95% CI 0.006 to 0.034]. This study demonstrated a causal effect of age at menarche on adult sleep duration, since age of menarche also affects obesity, our novel finding may be relevant to the observed relation of sleep duration with obesity and poor health.
Highlights
Earlier age of puberty has detrimental consequences for many aspects of health
Later pubertal development was associated with higher family socioeconomic position (SEP), such as parents’ birthplace, highest parental occupation, household income per head in quintiles and highest parental education level (Table 1)
In a population-representative Chinese birth cohort (“Children of 1997”)[22] from an understudied non-Western population, age of menarche was positively associated with sleep duration at about 13.5 years
Summary
Earlier age of puberty has detrimental consequences for many aspects of health. Here, for the first time, we assessed the association of earlier puberty with sleep duration observationally and with validation using Mendelian Randomization. Given genetic variants are allocated randomly at conception, MR, as a quasi-experimental study design, is less susceptible to confounding and so provides an alternative means of assessing the causal effect of puberty on sleep duration. Several studies using this approach have recently clarified the associations of age of menarche with adolescent depression[20], time spent in education[21] and adult body mass index[13], but no MR study has assessed the causal effects of earlier puberty on adult sleep duration[14]. We used two-sample MR to validate the causal effect of later puberty on adult sleep duration
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