Abstract
Excessive daytime sleepiness is a frequent condition among children and adolescents that may lead to several and significant daytime consequences, including impaired neurocognitive skills and scholastic performance. Here, we evaluated in one hundred and ninety-one unselected primary school children, the relationship between sleepiness and a wide range of cognitive and academic skills through a standardized neuropsychological test battery. In order to assess the statistical relationship, we performed a partial least squares path modelling, a non-parametrical approach which combined a model of paths between latent variables and the coefficients between indicators and dimensions. Results were validated through the bootstrap approach and suggest that sleepiness is not associated with all cognitive and scholastic abilities, but only with those relying on verbal abilities and complex cognitive functions (i.e., reading comprehension, oral/syntactic comprehension, spelling, and mathematic skills). Our data suggest the idea that sleepiness in children is associated mostly with “higher” (mainly verbal) cognitive function(s), while the visuospatial domain was not affected.
Highlights
Several lines of research point out that sleep may influence neurocognitive development as well as cognitive skills and scholastic achievement in children and adolescents [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
It seems reasonable that, in order to support the idea that there is a relationship between sleepiness and cognition, studies assessing directly and the association between sleepiness and cognitive skills are needed [44]
The hypothesis that sleepiness affects cognition and school performance arises mainly from studies investigating the impact of sleep deprivation/restriction or sleep disorders on cognitive and academic skills
Summary
Several lines of research point out that sleep may influence (both positively and negatively) neurocognitive development as well as cognitive skills and scholastic achievement in children and adolescents [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. There are numerous and complex biopsychosocial conditions that may cause (independently, jointly or through their interactions) excessive daytime sleepiness [9,10,11,12,14] They may be conceptualized under the following broad categories: Insufficient sleep duration (due, for instance, to poor sleep hygiene as well as biological factors; see below), fragmented/disturbed sleep (caused by, for example, medical problems such as gastroesophageal reflux as well as sleep disorders such as sleep-disordered breathing (SDB)), circadian misalignment (e.g., delay sleep-wake phase syndrome), primary disorders that increase sleep needs (e.g., depression, narcolepsy, hypothalamic lesions) [9,11] (Morse and Kothare, 2019; Owens et al, 2020), and intrinsic development related to
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