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. 2023 Jul 26:11:1213558.
doi: 10.3389/fped.2023.1213558. eCollection 2023.

Effect of catch-up sleep on obesity in Korean adolescents: a nationwide cross-sectional study

Youngha Choi  1 , Sujin Kim  2 , Myeongseob Lee  2 , Hae In Lee  3 , Kyungchul Song  2 , Junghwan Suh  2 , Hyun Wook Chae  2 , Ho-Seong Kim  2 , Ahreum Kwon  2
Affiliations

Effect of catch-up sleep on obesity in Korean adolescents: a nationwide cross-sectional study

Youngha Choi et al. Front Pediatr. .

Abstract

Background: Adolescents have weekday/weekend sleep discrepancies and may compensate for weekday sleep debt through sleep extension on weekends.

Objective: We investigated the effects of total sleep duration on weekdays/weekends on obesity and determined if weekend catch-up sleep has an ameliorating effect on obesity in Korean adolescents.

Methods: Using data from the KNHANES VII, 1,306 middle and high school students were assessed for total sleep duration on weekdays, weekends, and the entire week, as well as weekend sleep extension. Participants were classified into four groups according to weekend sleep extension.

Results: Total sleep duration and weekend sleep duration were negatively associated with body mass index z-score. Increased weekend sleep duration and sleep extension on weekends decreased the relative risk of overweight/obesity with each 30 min increment, reducing the risk by a factor of 0.39 and 0.93, respectively. The risk of overweight/obesity in adolescents who slept less than 6 h on weekdays increased by a factor of 1.93 when they slept for less than 3 h on weekends.

Conclusion: Weekend catch-up sleep had a negative dose-dependent association with obesity in Korean adolescents. Sleeping longer on weekends may be associated with a decreased risk of obesity, even if the adolescent obtains less sleep during weekdays. However, further prospective studies are needed to establish the causality between extended weekend sleep and obesity.

Keywords: adolescents; catch-up sleep; obesity; overweight; sleep deprivation; sleep duration.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Selection of study participants. Participants with a calculated sleep duration on weekdays of less than 4 h (N = 9) or more than 14 h (N = 1), a calculated sleep duration on weekends of less than 4 h (N = 3) or more than 15 h (N = 1), a bedtime on weekdays after 4 a.m. (N = 0), or a wake-up time on weekdays after 10 a.m. (N = 11) are treated as outliers (total N = 25), and excluded.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Body mass index z-score and relative risk of overweight/obesity in the four sleep duration groups. SWD, short sleep on weekday; SWK, short sleep on weekends; LWD, long sleep on weekdays; LWK, long sleep on weekends; BMI, body mass index; RR, relative risk.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Effect of weekend sleep extension (WK-E) according to total sleep duration (TSD) on weekdays on body mass index (BMI) z-score. (A) BMI z-scores according to TSD on weekdays. (B) BMI z-scores according to TSD on weekdays and WK-E.
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