Sleep Behaviors and the Shape of Subcortical Brain Structures in Children with Overweight/Obesity: A Cross-Sectional Study

To examine the relationship between sleep and subcortical brain structures using a shape analysis approach. A total of 98 children with overweight/obesity (10.0 ± 1.1 y, 59 boys) were included in the cross-sectional analyses. Sleep behaviors (i.e., wake time, sleep onset time, total time in bed, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, and wakening after sleep onset) were estimated with wrist-worn accelerometers. The shape of the subcortical brain structures was acquired by magnetic resonance imaging. A partial correlation permutation approach was used to examine the relationship between sleep behaviors and brain shapes. Among all the sleep variables studied, only total time in bed was significantly related to pallidum and putamen structure, such that those children who spent more time in bed had greater expansions in the right and left pallidum (211–751 voxels, all p’s <0.04) and right putamen (1783 voxels, p = 0.03). These findings suggest that more time in bed was related to expansions on two subcortical brain regions in children with overweight/obesity.