Previous studies have shown that adults are prone to mental and cognitive problems if their sleep duration is too short. A population-based study found that short sleep duration or insomnia significantly increases cerebrovascular disease, mental illness, and metabolic disorders. Another meta-analysis found that changes in sleep, such as changes in sleep depth and rapid eye movement sleep phase, occur in various mental disorders, including schizophrenia, anxiety, emotional disorders, overeating, and autism. So what is the principle behind this?

Some studies have found that this is caused by the influence of related brain functions, including the lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and anterior thalamus. Children are a special group of people in the field of mental health. As their brains are still in the developmental stage, the impact of shortened sleep duration on them may be different from that of adults. Although recent studies have found that shortened sleep duration in children can affect their cognitive function and mental health, the brain structure and development, as well as related neural mechanisms, are still unclear.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) cohort was conducted among 110000 children, which is an unprecedented large-scale multimodal neuroimaging study. Dr. Wei Cheng and other scholars from Fudan University in Shanghai measured the morphological information of different brain regions to study the relationship between brain structure, cognitive function, and mental health in these children, And the mechanism was estimated through intermediary analysis.

The subjects were children aged 9-11 from 21 centers in the United States. The sleep assessment method is the ABCD Parent-child Sleep Disorder Scale, which evaluates the frequency of children's sleep awakening and other sleep behavioral issues; The assessment of cognitive function is conducted through the NIH Cognitive Toolkit, which consists of 7 components: language vocabulary knowledge, attention, cognitive control, working memory, executive function, plot memory, and language; Researchers also used parent-child behavior questionnaires to evaluate mental health, assessing different dimensions of psychopathology (depression, anxiety, and impulsive behavior), as well as children's adaptive abilities. The relationship between the above measurement results is statistically analyzed using a linear mixed effects model, including t-statistics and Cohen's d effects. The error detection rate and Bonferroni correction are adjusted for the results of multiple comparisons.

The article was published in Molecular Psychiatry magazine in February 2020. The results showed that the psychopathological dimensions of depression, anxiety, and impulsive behavior were negatively correlated with sleep duration. The shorter the sleep duration, the more likely these symptoms were to occur; The brain regions associated with prolonged sleep include the orbitofrontal cortex, prefrontal and temporal cortex, anterior cuneiform lobe, and supramarginal gyrus; The longitudinal data results show that mental problems, especially depression, are significantly correlated with a short duration of sleep lasting for more than a year; Mediation analysis found that depression has a significant impact on these sleep related brain regions; The higher the cognitive score, the greater the capacity of the prefrontal cortex, temporal cortex, and midline of the orbitofrontal cortex.

This study reminds public health departments to call on parents to pay attention to their children's sleep, and for clinical purposes, it also suggests that these brain regions have a certain correlation with children's sleep and depression, which can be a direction for prevention, diagnosis, and future scientific research.