Poster #104 - Sleep and Executive Function in Overweight and Obese Toddlers

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Health, Growth, Injury

Integrative Statement

Purpose: Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past fifty years (CDC, 2014) and represents a serious concern as it is associated with sub-optimal childhood health and cognitive outcomes (Moffit et al., 2011). One cognitive outcome affected by obesity, executive function (EF), refers to a set of skills including attention, working memory, and inhibition (Miyake et al., 2000) that is linked to prefrontal development thus enabling the maturation of advanced problem-solving techniques and goal directed behavior (Diamond, 2002). Sleep also plays a significant role in EF development as it affects the regulation of hormonal and homeostatic systems underlying optimal prefrontal development (Bernier et al., 2010). If sleep is a key predictor of EF in a typically developing population, then one might expect a relationship among overweight and obese children given that insufficient sleep patterns are often co-morbid with excess childhood weight (Patel, 2012). We hypothesize that, among overweight and obese children, those with better sleep patterns will have higher levels of EF compared with those who demonstrate sleep insufficiencies.
Method: The present pilot study consisted of 25 children ages 24-46 months old with an average BMI in the 82nd percentile and no co-morbid medical conditions. We collected all participant data from the pre-assessment protocol of the ENRICH (Encouraging Nurturing Responsiveness to Improve Child Heath) pilot project (NIH: r21HL122618). We obtained sleep analysis from waist-worn accelerometer measurements and focused on two key aspects of sleep: sleep quantity and sleep quality. Sleep quantity was defined as the total duration a participant slept each night excluding both sleep latency and duration of wakings after sleep onset. Sleep quality was defined as the duration of time spent sleeping divided by the total time in bed. We assessed EF with the Snack Delay task (Kochanska, Murray & Harlan, 2000). The degree of intentional delay, or lack thereof, in anticipation of a reward determined the toddler’s estimated level of EF development. Numerous studies have focused on snack delay as an indicator of EF (Carlson, 2010).
Results: We used regression analyses to investigate relations between different aspects of sleep and executive function. We ran separate regressions for each aspect of sleep as sleep quantity and quality were highly correlated, see Table 1 for correlations, means and standard deviations of all variables. We also controlled for children’s BMI within all analyses. Results indicated that sleep quantity was significantly associated with children’s executive function (β = 0.46, p< .05), when controlling for children’s BMI status. On the other hand, sleep quality, while positively associated with executive function, was not a significant predictor of EF (β = 0.27, p = .27).
Conclusion: In agreement with current literature, our study demonstrated that better sleep patterns promoted more effective EF development and this theory held true among an overweight and obese sample of toddlers. Of the two sleep aspects analyzed, only sleep quantity significantly predicted EF suggesting the amount of sleep a toddler achieves each night may be more critical for EF development than the percentage of restful sleep.

Authors

• Erin Andrews, UT Houston Medical School
  Presenting Author

• Janelle J. Montroy, University of Texas Health Science Center, Children's Learning Institute
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ursula Johnson, University of Texas Health Science Center, Children's Learning Institute
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Landry, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shreela Sharma, University of Texas Health Science Center, Children's Learning Institute
  Non-Presenting Author