Last night's sleep in relation to academic achievement and neurocognitive testing performance in adolescents with and without ADHD

Caroline N Cusick; Paul A Isaacson; Joshua M Langberg; Stephen P Becker

doi:10.1016/j.sleep.2018.07.014

Last night's sleep in relation to academic achievement and neurocognitive testing performance in adolescents with and without ADHD

Sleep Med. 2018 Dec:52:75-79. doi: 10.1016/j.sleep.2018.07.014. Epub 2018 Aug 21.

Authors

Caroline N Cusick¹, Paul A Isaacson¹, Joshua M Langberg², Stephen P Becker³

Affiliations

¹ Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
² Department of Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA.
³ Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA; Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH, USA. Electronic address: stephen.becker@cchmc.org.

Abstract

Objectives/background: Objectives were to (1) examine previous night's sleep in relation to next day performance on standardized academic achievement and neurocognitive assessments in adolescents, and (2) explore whether previous night's sleep is differentially associated with testing performance for adolescents with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Participants/methods: Participants were 300 adolescents (ages 12-14 years; 55% male). Approximately half (53.6%) were diagnosed with ADHD. Adolescents provided ratings of their previous night's sleep quality, sleep duration, and number of night wakings and were administered standardized tests of processing speed and working memory, as well as word reading, numerical operations, and math fluency academic achievement.

Results: In analyses controlling for sex, race, medication use, time of testing, and ADHD group status, more night wakings the previous night were associated with significantly lower numerical operations and math fluency achievement scores and marginally lower working memory scores. Previous night's sleep was not associated with processing speed or reading achievement. ADHD status did not moderate sleep in relation to academic/neurocognitive performance. Participants reporting ≥2 night wakings the previous night had slightly over half a standard deviation lower scores on average compared to participants reporting 0 night wakings.

Conclusions: This preliminary study suggests that previous night's wakings are associated with poorer mathematics performance the next day, regardless of ADHD status. This may be due to the detrimental effect of interrupted and fragmented sleep on attention and executive control. These findings have implications for clinicians and educators when considering contextual factors that may impact academic and neurocognitive testing performance.

Keywords: Adolescence; Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; Math; Processing speed; Sleep; Working memory.

Publication types

Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Academic Success*
Adolescent
Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity / psychology*
Child
Female
Humans
Male
Neuropsychological Tests* / statistics & numerical data
Sleep / physiology*

Grants and funding

K23 MH108603/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United States