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Sleep duration and overweight in Chinese adolescents: a prospective longitudinal study with 2-year follow-up

  • Pediatrics • Original Article
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Abstract

Purpose

This prospectively designed study aimed to investigate the association between sleep duration and overweight in a cohort of Chinese adolescents.

Methods

A school-based cohort study with a 2-year follow-up was conducted among Chinese adolescents in Ningbo region (China). For the baseline study, 1901 school-aged Chinese children aged 12–13 years were recruited. Finally, 1510 adolescents were successfully reinterviewed in October 2018. Participants were asked to complete a self-administered questionnaire, and their heights and weights were directly measured.

Results

Overweight adolescents had shorter sleep duration or later bedtimes than non-overweight children in baseline (P < 0.05). In the multivariable linear regression analysis, sleep duration was marginally significantly correlated with body mass index (BMI) at baseline and significantly correlated with this parameter at a 2-year follow-up (β = − 0.23, 95% confidence interval (CI): − 0.51 to 0.04, P < 0.1; β = − 0.27, 95% CI: − 0.42 to − 0.11, P < 0.05, respectively). After adjusting for potential confounders, the multivariable logistic regression analysis revealed associations of a longer sleep duration at baseline with a reduced likelihood of participants being overweight both at baseline and at follow-up (adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 0.81, 95% CI: 0.66 to 1.00, P = 0.05; AOR = 0.43, 95% CI:0.24 to 0.76, P < 0.05, respectively).

Conclusions

Shorter sleep was associated with an increased likelihood of being overweight in Chinese adolescents, while a 1-h decrease in sleep per night led to a more than 50% increase in the overweight risk at the 2-year follow-up.

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Funding

This research was funded by grants from the Nature Science Foundation of Ningbo (NO. 2016A610181, 2018A610403), Ningbo Health Branding Subject Fund (PPXK2018–10), Science Technology project of Ningbo (NO. 2017C50045), and the National Key R&D Program of China (NO. 2018YFC1315305). The authors thank the participants of the NYRBS study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Epidemiology, Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Pathophysiology, School of Medicine, Ningbo University, Ningbo, 315211, China

    Qing-Hai Gong & Li-Yuan Han

  2. Ningbo Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Ningbo, 315010, Zhejiang Province, China

    Qing-Hai Gong, Si-Xuan Li, Si-Jia Wang & Hui Li

  3. Yinzhou Hospital Affiliated to Medical School of Ningbo University, Ningbo, 315040, Zhejiang Province, China

    Yan-Hui Wu

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  1. Qing-Hai Gong
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Correspondence to Yan-Hui Wu, Li-Yuan Han or Hui Li.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Qing-Hai Gong and Si-Xuan Li are co-first authors.

Yan-Hui Wu, Li-Yuan Han, and Hui Li contributed equally to this work.

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Gong, QH., Li, SX., Wang, SJ. et al. Sleep duration and overweight in Chinese adolescents: a prospective longitudinal study with 2-year follow-up. Sleep Breath 24, 321–328 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11325-019-01979-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11325-019-01979-0

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