Abstract
Changing sleep rhythms in adolescents often lead to sleep deficits and a delay in sleep timing between weekdays and weekends. The adolescent brain, and in particular the rapidly developing structures involved in emotional control, are vulnerable to external and internal factors. In our previous study in adolescents at age 14, we observed a strong relationship between weekend sleep schedules and regional medial prefrontal cortex grey matter volumes. Here, we aimed to assess whether this relationship remained in this group of adolescents of the general population at the age of 16 (n = 101; mean age 16.8 years; 55% girls). We further examined grey matter volumes in the hippocampi and the amygdalae, calculated with voxel-based morphometry. In addition, we investigated the relationships between sleep habits, assessed with self-reports, and regional grey matter volumes, and psychological functioning, assessed with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and tests on working memory and impulsivity. Later weekend wake-up times were associated with smaller grey matter volumes in the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdalae, and greater weekend delays in wake-up time were associated with smaller grey matter volumes in the right hippocampus and amygdala. The medial prefrontal cortex region mediated the correlation between weekend wake up time and externalising symptoms. Paying attention to regular sleep habits during adolescence could act as a protective factor against the emergence of psychopathology via enabling favourable brain development.
Highlights
Sleep problems and psychiatric disorders increase sharply hand in hand during adolescence, but our understanding of the potential neurobiological links between them is only emerging [1]
In our previous study of 14-year-old adolescents, we found late sleep during the weekend and short sleep during the week to be associated with smaller regional grey matter volumes, in the medial prefrontal cortex
In this follow-up study we aimed to assess whether our previous findings on the correlation between adolescents’ sleep habits and regional brain grey matter volumes in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) remained present at the age of 16, and to extend these findings by including the hippocampus and amygdala brain regions and examining the relationships with psychological functioning
Summary
Sleep problems and psychiatric disorders increase sharply hand in hand during adolescence, but our understanding of the potential neurobiological links between them is only emerging [1]. Sleep disturbances seem to precede the onset of diverse psychiatric disorders [5] These studies support the theory that unhealthy sleep habits could affect the developing adolescent brain structure and thereby increase the vulnerability to various kinds of psychopathologies, but few studies on the relationship between adolescents’ sleep habits and brain grey matter volumes have been published to date. Poor sleep and eveningness-prone or irregular sleep rhythms can negatively affect adolescents’ emotion regulation, reward-related processing, and impulse inhibition by influencing the mPFC [12,13,14] as well as the amygdala and the hippocampus [15,16,17,18,19] These structures have been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of psychiatric disorders [20, 21]. Understanding the trajectories that lead toward psychiatric disorders as early as possible in development would allow us to develop effective intervention and prevention strategies
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