Elsevier

Sleep Medicine

Volume 16, Issue 1, January 2015, Pages 87-93
Sleep Medicine

Original Article
Associations of self-reported sleep disturbance and duration with academic failure in community-dwelling Swedish adolescents: Sleep and academic performance at school

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2014.09.004Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Sleep problems are common among adolescents living in Uppsala County (Sweden).

  • Reports of sleep quality and length predict academic failure in adolescents.

  • Gender impacts the association strength between sleep quality and academic failure.

Abstract

Objective

To examine associations of self-reported sleep disturbance and short sleep duration with the risk for academic failure.

Methods

A cohort of ~40,000 adolescents (age range: 12–19 years) who were attending high school grades 7, 9, and 2nd year of upper secondary school in the Swedish Uppsala County were invited to participate in the Life and Health Young Survey (conducted between 2005 and 2011 in Uppsala County, Sweden). In addition to the question how many subjects they failed during the school year (outcome variable), subsamples of adolescents also answered questions related to subjective sleep disturbance (n = 20,026) and habitual sleep duration (n = 4736) (exposure variables). Binary logistic regression analysis was utilized to explore if self-reported sleep disturbances and habitual short sleep duration (defined as less than 7–8 h sleep per night) increase the relative risk to fail subjects during the school year (controlled for possible confounders, e.g. body-mass-index).

Results

Adolescents with self-reported sleep disturbances had an increased risk for academic failure (i.e., they failed at least one subject during the school year; OR: boys, 1.68; girls, 2.05, both P < 0.001), compared to adolescents without self-reported sleep disturbances. In addition, adolescents who reported short sleep duration on both working and weekend days were more likely to fail at least one subject at school than those who slept at least 7–8 h per night (OR: boys, 4.1; girls, 5.0, both P < 0.001).

Conclusion

Our findings indicate that reports of sleep disturbance and short sleep duration are linked to academic failure in adolescents. Based on our data, causality cannot be established.

Keywords

Sleep disturbance
Short sleep duration
Internet use at night
Adolescents
Academic failure
Cohort study

Cited by (0)

The authors have nothing to disclose.