# Longitudinal Measurement of the Changing Sleep Need in Adolescence

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS · 2020 · $609,984

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
The long-term goals of our research are to describe the age trajectories of sleep, sleep EEG, and sleep need,
focusing on changes across and through adolescence. Achieving these goals will help fill major gaps in our
knowledge, gaps which have direct and important implications for both public health and developmental
neuroscience. Insufficient sleep and daytime sleepiness are associated with impaired physical and mental
health and behavioral problems. Insufficient sleep is particularly critical during adolescence because of the
profound reorganization of the human brain that takes place over the second decade of life. Despite its
importance, we lack basic evidence on the quantitative relations of adolescent sleep durations to daytime
sleepiness and performance. The recently released American Academy of Sleep Medicine consensus
statement on adolescent sleep need was necessarily based mainly on post-hoc studies that showed
correlations between poor sleep habits and impaired health and performance. Our proposed project will
extend our ongoing prospective dose-response studies of the effects of varied sleep durations on daytime
cognitive function, daytime sleepiness and sleep EEG patterns. The first 3 years of this study (spanning ages
10-16 years) revealed a number of interesting findings, including a divergence in the age effects of sleep
duration on daytime sleepiness and daytime performance. The Continuing Renewal will extend our studies
from mid-adolescence through young adulthood and allow us to determine whether the changes we observed
thus far are transient maturational events or continue into adulthood. In addition to expanding the age range,
the proposed continuation adds new measures and new methods of analysis of the effects of sleep duration
effects on cognition. With the new additional data, the expanded study will span ages 10 to 23 years. By
including the transition to young adulthood we can test rigorously the important basic science question of
whether the adolescent changes in sleep duration-daytime sleepiness and performance relations are
correlated with the steep adolescent decline of delta power in the NREM EEG; this decline is the most massive
brain change of adolescence that can be measured non-invasively. The proposed studies will provide the first
systematic longitudinal dose-response data on sleep need across this age range. Such data will begin to
address the urgent need for evidence-based public health recommendations for adolescent sleep durations.
Understanding the basic causes of daytime sleepiness in adolescence is a major goal of the National Center
on Sleep Disorders Research of the National Heart Lung Blood Institute. The proposed studies will advance
that understanding by providing the first longitudinal description of changes in sleep EEG and sleep need from
late childhood through adolescence and into young adulthood. These data will also bear on the neuroscience
of adolescent brain matur...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9969398
- **Project number:** 5R01HL116490-07
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
- **Principal Investigator:** IRWIN FEINBERG
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $609,984
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2013-09-01 → 2022-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9969398

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9969398, Longitudinal Measurement of the Changing Sleep Need in Adolescence (5R01HL116490-07). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9969398. Licensed CC0.

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