Abstract
Previous studies have reported a shift in the timing of sleep during adolescence toward a later time. To date, it is unclear whether hormonal changes during puberty might contribute to this change in sleeping behavior. We systematically assessed pubertal development and sleep timing in a cross-sectional case-control study in girls with precocious (n = 42) and boys with delayed pubertal development (n = 19). We used the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire and the Children’s ChronoType Questionnaire to assess sleep timing in patients and age- and sex-matched controls (n = 309) and used the midpoint of sleep on free days, corrected for potential sleep debt accumulated during the school week, as a marker for sleep timing. Compared to the controls, girls with central precocious puberty showed a delay in sleep timing of 54 min, and girls with premature pubarche slept on average 30 min later. Male adolescents with delayed pubertal development showed an average sleep midpoint that was 40 min earlier compared to the control group. The results of this pilot study suggest an association between pubertal onset and shifts in sleep timing, which is a novel finding in human sleep behavior. Prospective studies in larger cohorts will be needed to examine the robustness and generalizability of the findings.
Highlights
Sleep timing, a key aspect of sleep behavior, varies largely within the population [1]
We observed that boys with a delayed pubertal development had a significantly earlier chronotype than the male database control cohort of the same age (n = 19) (Figure 2A; Table 2)
Sleep timing did not differ between the 10 girls with a premature thelarche and the controls (Figure 2B, Table 2)
Summary
A key aspect of sleep behavior, varies largely within the population [1]. Clocks&Sleep 2019, 1, 13 between individuals who wake up early in the morning and individuals who wake up late in the day This variation in sleep timing has been used as a proxy for chronotype, or the individual phase of entrainment [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Adolescents on average have a later phase of entrainment and this is paralleled by their sleep timings, especially on non-school days when sleep timing is not affected by school start times, but at least in part regulated by the circadian system This phase delay leads to a mismatch with early school and work start times, a phenomenon referred to as social jetlag [14]. Higher levels of social jetlag have been associated with adverse metabolic profiles and obesity [12,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]
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