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Abstract Introduction Research suggests that up to 70% of U.S. adolescents get less than 8 hours of sleep per night regularly and less than 25% of children ages 6-17 years old meet the CDC recommendation of 60 minutes of daily physical activity. We hypothesize that decreased physical activity was associated with worse sleep among adolescents across 2017 to 2021, and that the magnitude of the association may have changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods We utilized the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) for our analyses. All participants of the 2017, 2019, and 2021 national YRBS surveys were eligible for inclusion. The main outcome of interest was school-night sleep duration (ordinal variable: = 5 hours, 6-7 hours, 8+ hours), and the primary predictor was days per week of 60+ minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity. We conducted survey weighted ordinal logistic regressions to explore the association between physical activity and sleep. Results The analytic sample included 38,531 adolescents; ages 12 to 18 years old. Across all three years of the data, each additional day of physical activity was associated with a similar increase in the odds of receiving more sleep: in 2021 OR = 1.11 95%CI 1.08 – 1.15, in 2019: 1.09, 95%CI 1.07 – 1.12, and in 2017: 1.08 95%CI 1.05 – 1.11. Conclusion As hypothesized, increased physical activity was significantly associated with increased sleep. Although the effect size increased somewhat across the three years sequentially, this change was not statistically significant. 2023 YRBSS data will be available in January 2024. We plan to run additional analyses to expand on initial findings at that time, in addition to identifying potential effect modifiers of the relationship. Support (if any)
Anderson et al. (Sat,) studied this question.