Sleep Difficulties in Infancy Are Associated with Symptoms of Inattention and Hyperactivity at the Age of 5 Years: A Longitudinal Study.
Hanna Huhdanpää, Isabel Morales-Muñoz, Eeva T Aronen and 5 others
PMID 31166249WHAT IT FOUND
Children whose parents reported shorter sleep at 3 months were more likely to have inattention at 5 years.
Sleep problems at 24 months and 5 years were linked to inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity. Infant sleep duration was not linked to later hyperactivity.
Key findings
01Children with shorter sleep duration at 3 months were more likely to score above the inattention cutoff at 5 years.
02Sleep duration at 3 and 8 months, and at 24 months in the fully adjusted model, was associated with inattentive symptoms at 5 years.
03Children with parent-reported sleep problems at 2 or more time points had higher inattention and hyperactivity-impulsivity scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Only 42.6% of the consented families responded when children were 5 years old, so the results may not represent all families. Mothers who responded were older and more highly educated than mothers who did not respond, and this may have lowered the observed risk of attention problems. Sleep and attention were measured by parent report, not by objective tests such as actigraphy or teacher ratings. Parenting strategies and other environmental factors that may affect both sleep and attention were not fully accounted for. The study excluded children with severe chronic illnesses or disabilities and co-twins, so it may not apply to those groups.
Declared interests
The article is listed as supported by non-U.S. government research funding. The authors declared no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that short sleep in infancy causes later inattention. This study was observational and used parent-reported sleep and behavior measures, so it shows association rather than cause. The study also did not find longitudinal associations between infant sleep duration, night awakenings, or parent-reported sleep problems and later hyperactivity-impulsivity.