Somatomotor disconnection links sleep duration with socioeconomic context, screen time, cognition, and psychopathology

Background: Sleep is critical for healthy brain development and emotional wellbeing, especially during adolescence when sleep, behavior, and neurobiology are rapidly evolving. Theoretical reviews and empirical research have historically focused on how sleep influences mental health through its impact on higher-order brain systems. No studies have leveraged data-driven network neuroscience methods to uncover interpretable, brain-wide signatures of sleep duration in adolescence, their socio-environmental origins, or their consequences for cognition and mental health.

Methods: Here, we implement graph theory and component-based predictive modeling to examine how a multimodal index of sleep duration is associated with intrinsic brain architecture in 3,173 youth (11-12 years) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development^SM Study.

Results: We demonstrate that network integration/segregation exhibit a strong, generalizable multivariate association with sleep duration. We next identify a single component of brain architecture centered on a single network as the dominant contributor of this relationship. This component is characterized by increasing disconnection of a lower-order system - the somatomotor network - from other systems, with shorter sleep duration. Finally, greater somatomotor disconnection is associated with lower socioeconomic resources, longer screen times, reduced cognitive/academic performance, and elevated externalizing problems.

Conclusions: These findings reveal a novel neural signature of shorter sleep in adolescence that is intertwined with environmental risk, cognition, and psychopathology. By robustly elucidating the key involvement of an understudied brain system in sleep, cognition, and psychopathology, this study can inform theoretical and translational research directions on sleep to promote neurobehavioral development and mental health during the adolescent transition.