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598 Sleep Variability and Infant Anthropometry during the First 6 Months


 
 
 Sleep plays a crucial role in children’s health and development, and emerging evidence suggests that sleep disturbances during infancy negatively impact both the neurocognitive and socioemotional outcomes later in life. However, no study has taken the variability of sleep into account when examining physical growth in infancy, which is a critical period for both healthy sleep and weight development. The purpose of the study was to examine the association between sleep variability and physical growth in infants aged 6 months.
 
 
 
 316 healthy infants recruited during their 6-month well-child checkups had their weight and length measured, and wore an actigraph on the ankle for a week. Average weekday, weekend, and all week sleep duration were computed, with infants categorized into three groups: regular sleep, weekend catch-up sleep, and weekend sleep curtailment. General linear model analyses were performed with sleep variability as the primary predictor variable of interest and infant anthropometry as the dependent variable.
 
 
 
 Average weekday daily sleep duration was 10.76 (1.06) hours which was similar to the average weekend daily sleep duration of 10.68 (1.06) hours. In both unadjusted and adjusted models controlling for potential confounding variables, infants in the weekend catch-up sleep group (30.4%) and those in the weekend sleep curtailment group (34.5%) had significantly higher weight-to-length ratios, body mass index, and weight-for-age z scores when compared with infants in the regular sleep group (35.1%, all p < 0.05).
 
 
 
 Weekday-weekend sleep pattern differences exist even as early as in the first 6 months of life, and either weekend catch-up sleep or weekend sleep loss is associated with higher infant anthropometric markers. Our findings suggest that sleep assessments in infants in well-child checkups should include not only global assessments of average sleep duration but also address sleep pattern regularity.
 
 
 
 This study was funded by the National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan, NHRI-EX102-10229PC.
