Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The objective of this research was to examine the relationships between sleep duration and various health outcomes in children and youth age 5-17 years. Health outcomes included adiposity, emotional regulation, cognition/academic achievement, quality of life/well-being, harms/injuries, and cardiometabolic biomarkers. A total of 141 articles, including 592,215 participants from 40 different countries, met inclusion criteria and were included in this study. Overall, longer sleep duration was associated with lower adiposity indicators, better emotional regulation, better academic achievement, and better quality of life/well-being. The evidence was mixed and/or limited for the association between sleep duration and cognition, harms/injuries, and cardiometabolic biomarkers. The quality of evidence ranged from very low to high across study designs and health indicators. In conclusion, we confirmed previous investigations showing that shorter sleep duration is associated with adverse physical and mental health outcomes. In order to better inform contemporary sleep recommendations, there is a need for sleep restriction/extension interventions that examine the changes in different outcome measures against various amounts of sleep to have a better sense of dose-response relationships.