Getting a Good Night's Sleep: Associations Between Sleep Duration and Parent-Reported Sleep Quality on Default Mode Network Connectivity in Youth

Purpose: Sleep plays an important role in healthy neurocognitive development, and poor sleep is linked to cognitive and emotional dysfunction. Studies in adults suggest that shorter sleep duration and poor sleep quality may disrupt core neurocognitive networks, particularly the default mode network (DMN)da network implicated in internal cognitive processing and rumination. Here, we examine the relationships between sleep and within-and between-network resting-state func-tional connectivity (rs-FC) of the DMN in youth.Methods: This study included 3,798 youth (11.9 +/- 0.6 years, 47.5% female) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development cohort. Sleep duration and wake after sleep onset (WASO) were quantified using Fitbit watch recordings, and parent-reported sleep disturbances were measured using the Sleep Disturbance Scale for Children. We focused on rs-FC between the DMN and anticorrelated networks (i.e., dorsal attention network [DAN], frontoparietal network, salience network).Results: Both shorter sleep duration and greater sleep disturbances were associated with weaker within-network DMN rs-FC. Shorter sleep duration was also associated with weaker anti -correlation (i.e., higher rs-FC) between the DMN and two anticorrelated networks: the DAN and frontoparietal network. Greater WASO was also associated with DMN-DAN rs-FC, and the effects of WASO on rs-FC were most pronounced among children who slept fewer hours/night.Discussion: Together, these data suggest that different aspects of sleep are associated with distinct and interactive alterations in resting-state brain networks. Alterations in core neurocognitive networks may confer increased risk for emotional psychopathology and attention-related vul-nerabilities. Our findings contribute to the growing number of studies demonstrating the impor-tance of healthy sleep practices in youth. (c) 2023 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Sleep plays a crucial role in neurocognitive development, and insufficient or poor quality sleep can negatively impact cognitive and emotional functions. This study examines the associations between sleep and resting-state functional connectivity of the default mode network (DMN) in youth.