The effect of sleep-corrected social jetlag on crystalized intelligence, school performance, and functional connectome in early adolescence

Approximately half of adolescents encounter a mismatch between their sleep patterns on school days and free days, also referred to as “social jetlag”. This condition has been linked to various adverse outcomes, such as poor sleep, cognitive deficits, and mental disorders. However, prior research was unsuccessful in accounting for other variables that are correlated with social jetlag, including sleep duration and quality. To address this limitation, we applied a propensity score matching method on a sample of 8853 11–12-year-olds from the two-year follow-up (FL2) data of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. We identified 3366 pairs of participants with high sleep-corrected social jetlag (SJLsc, over 1 hour) and low SJLsc (<= 1 hour) at FL2, as well as 1277 pairs at three-year follow-up (FL3), after matching based on 11 covariates including socioeconomic status, demographics, and sleep duration and quality. Our results showed that high SJLsc, as measured by the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire, was linked to reduced crystallized intelligence, lower school performance - grades, and decreased functional connectivity between cortical networks and subcortical regions, specifically between cingulo-opercular network and right hippocampus (cerc-hprh). Further mediation and longitudinal mediation analyses revealed that cerc-hprh connection mediated the associations between SJLsc and crystallized intelligence at FL2, and between SJLsc and grades at both FL2 and FL3. We validated these findings by replicating these results using objective SJLsc measurements obtained via Fitbit watches. Overall, our study highlights the negative association between social jetlag and crystallized intelligence during early adolescence.