Abstract
Objective
Violence behaviours are among the leading causes of mortality and morbidity among young people worldwide, and evidence has shown changes in sleep patterns seem to affect school attainment, behaviour, emotion and attention control, and social interactions and relate with a more aggressive behaviour. We assessed the association between sleep duration and physical fighting involvement among 17-year-old Portuguese school-going adolescents.
Subject and methods
The analysis included 2426 Portuguese adolescents observed at wave 2 of the EPITeen cohort. Sleep duration was estimated by self-reported bed and wake-up times. Physical fighting involvement was based on the self-reported data regarding the year before the evaluation. Logistic regression models adjusted for potential confounders were used to calculate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI).
Results
In our sample, 34.2% of participants had been involved in a physical fight at least once during the previous year. In girls, shorter sleep duration was significantly associated with physical fighting (OR = 1.35; 95% CI: 1.01; 1.81) and remained statistically significant after adjustment for parents’ education level (AOR = 1.36; 95% CI: 1.01; 1.83), although the association was attenuated after additional adjustment for tobacco use and depressive symptoms (AOR = 1.19; 95% CI: 0.86; 1.65). In boys, insufficient sleep was significantly associated with physical fighting (OR = 1.43; 95% CI: 1.12; 1.82) and remained statistically significant after adjustment for parents’ education level (AOR = 1.42; 95% CI: 1.11; 1.82) and after additional adjustment for tobacco use (AOR = 1.28; 95% CI: 1.00; 1.66).
Conclusion
Shorter duration of sleep seems to be associated with physical fighting involvement, although the relationship might be mediated by other behavioural factors.
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Funding
This study was funded by FEDER through the Operational Programme Competitiveness and Internationalization and national funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology—FCT (Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education) under the project “BioAdversity: How childhood social adversity shapes health: The biology of social adversity” (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016838; Ref. FCT PTDC/DTP-EPI/1687/2014), the Unidade de Investigação em Epidemiologia–Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (EPIUnit) (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006862; UID/DTP/04750/2013) and the postdoctoral grant SFRH/BPD/97015/2013 (to Sílvia Fraga) and PhD grant SFRH/BD/108742/2015 (to Sara Soares) co-funded by the FCT and the POCH/FSE Programme.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments.
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Soares, S., Araújo, J., Ramos, E. et al. Sleep duration and physical fighting involvement in late adolescence. J Public Health (Berl.) 27, 341–348 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-018-0955-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-018-0955-z