Photo Credit: Bogdan Malizkiy

The following is a summary of “Sleep and Daily Affect and Risk for Major Depression: Day-to-day and Prospective Associations in Late Adolescence and Early Adulthood,” published in the February 2024 issue of Pediatrics by Villaume, et al.

Short-term emotional swings are linked to not getting enough sleep, and not getting enough sleep is a risk factor for major depressive disorder (MDD). For a study, researchers sought to determine whether directly measuring sleep in late youth can predict the start of a major depressive episode (MDE) in early adulthood and whether daily affect plays a role in this relationship.

The study used subjective and objective sleep data, ecological momentary assessment, and diagnostic data from the longitudinal Youth Emotion Project to find out if short sleep predicts a mood that isn’t stable according to the ecological momentary assessment the next day; sleep predicts depressive episodes over the next 5 years; and moods that aren’t stable every day mediate the links between short sleep and later MDD. They used formal mediation studies, logistic regression, and fixed effects.

They showed that nights with less sleep are followed by days with more negative affect; short sleep predicted MDEs over the next 5 years (when past MDD was taken into account); and negative affect mediated the link between short sleep and later MDEs. Overall, their results show that sleep is a significant risk factor. This means that better sleep could be a good way to help teen’s and young adults’ moods and lower their risk of future MDEs.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X23004561