Fitbit-measured sleep duration in young adolescents is associated with functional connectivity in attentional,...

Adolescents often do not sleep as much as recommended by most national guidelines, which may impact their brain development. The current study aims to evaluate the relationship between objective assessment of sleep duration measured with actigraphy and brain network connectivity on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

We used data from the 2-year follow-up of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study comprising 3799 adolescents, ages 10-13 years old, to assess the relationship between sleep duration, measured by 2 weeks of Fitbit-derived actigraphy, and brain network connectivity derived from resting-state fMRI, using linear regression models. Linear regression analysis was also used to investigate the interaction between participant sex and sleep duration on brain network connectivity.

We identified both positive and negative correlations between mean sleep duration and 6 within-brain network and 30 between-network pairs. These included networks involved in attention (dorsal and ventral attention networks), executive control (cingulo-opercular and default mode networks), memory (retrosplenial temporal network), and sensory function (auditory and sensorimotor networks). We also identified sex-specific effects in three network pairs (auditory-retrosplenial temporal, retrosplenial temporal-sensorimotor, and visual-visual) and sex differences in functional connectivity across 23 distinct within- and between-network connections.

Sleep duration is associated with the functional network connectivity in attentional, executive control, memory, and sensory networks during early adolescence. The identification of sex-specific effects in select network pairs underscores the importance of sex as a biological variable in studies of adolescent sleep and brain development.