Why bedtime is SO important: Study reveals the widespread damage a late night does to children’s brains

New brain scans reveal sleep deprivation damages children’s brains more than previously thought.

Scientists have long been warning that we all need at least eight hours sleep – even adults – to prevent damage in the front brain regions, responsible for memory.

But a new study by the University Hospital of Zurich has laid bare the staggering damage sleeplessness inflicts on all parts of a child’s developing brain.

In particular, they found significant damage to the posterior brain regions – responsible for planned movements, spatial reasoning, and attention.

Salome Kurth, first author of the study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and a researcher at the University Hospital of Zurich, warns the effects will not be visible immediately but have long-lasting repercussions.

‘The process of sleep may be involved in brain ‘wiring’ in childhood and thus affect brain maturation,’ explains Kurth.

‘This research shows an increase in sleep need in posterior brain regions in children.’

After staying up too late, both children and adults need a period of deep sleep to recover.

This recovery phase is characterized by an increase in an electrical pattern called slow-wave activity, which can be measured with a non-invasive technique called an electroencephalogram.

With a large number of electrode channels distributed across the scalp, this method also detects which brain regions show more slow-wave activity than others.

Supported by a large student team, Kurth and her colleagues, Monique LeBourgeois professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Sean Deoni , professor at Brown University, studied the effects of 50 percent sleep deprivation in a group of 13 children between the ages of five and 12 years.

The team first measured the children’s deep sleep patterns during a normal night’s sleep.

They then re-measured on another night after the researchers had kept the children up well past their bedtimes by reading and playing games with them.

After only getting half of a night’s worth of sleep, the children showed more slow-wave activity towards the back regions of the brain – the parieto-occipital areas.

This suggests that the brain circuitry in these regions may be particularly susceptible to a lack of sleep.

The team also measured how this deep sleep activity correlated with the myelin content of the brain – a cornerstone of brain development.

Myelin is a fatty microstructure of the brain’s white matter that allows electrical information between brain cells to travel faster.

It can be measured with a specific magnetic resonance imaging technique…. read more here