Elsevier

Sleep Medicine

Volume 16, Issue 10, October 2015, Pages 1281-1286
Sleep Medicine

Original Article
Sleep duration and growth outcomes across the first two years of life in the GUSTO study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2015.07.006Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Sleep and growth outcomes were studied in an Asian birth cohort of 899 children.

  • Shorter sleep is associated with shorter body length in the first 2 years of life.

  • Shorter sleep is associated with higher body mass index (BMI) in Malay children.

  • Shorter sleep is associated with higher BMI in infants who slept ≤12 h/day at 3 months.

Abstract

Background and Aim

Short sleep duration is thought to be a factor contributing to increased body mass index (BMI) in both school-age children and adults. Our aim was to determine whether sleep duration associates with growth outcomes during the first two years of life.

Study design

Participants included 899 children enrolled in the Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes (GUSTO) birth cohort study. Anthropometric data (weight and body length) and parental reports of sleep duration were collected at 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 months of age. A mixed-model analysis was used to evaluate the longitudinal association of BMI and body length with sleep duration. In subgroup analyses, effects of ethnicity (Chinese, Indian, and Malay) and short sleep at three months of age (≤12 h per day) were examined on subsequent growth measures.

Results

In the overall cohort, sleep duration was significantly associated with body length (β = 0.028, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.002–0.053, p = 0.033), but not BMI, after adjustment for potential confounding factors. Only in Malay children, shorter sleep was associated with a higher BMI (β = −0.042, 95% CI −0.071 to −0.012, p = 0.005) and shorter body length (β = 0.079, 95% CI 0.030–0.128, p = 0.002). In addition, shorter sleep was associated with a higher BMI and shorter body length in children who slept ≤12 h per day at three months of age.

Conclusion

The association between sleep duration and growth outcomes begins in infancy. The small but significant relationship between sleep and growth anthropometric measures in early life might be amplified in later childhood.

Abbreviations

BISQ
Brief Infant Sleep Questionnaire
BMI
body mass index
GUSTO
Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes

Keywords

Sleep duration
Children
Growth
Body mass index
Body length
Cohort study

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