Scheduled optimal sleep duration and screen exposure time promotes cognitive performance and healthy BMI: a study among rural school children of India

ABSTRACT

Unhealthy Body Mass Index (BMI) is a primary manifestation of metabolic disorder. Disruption of sleep is a major factor that has been observed to culminate into metabolic disorders. Sleep parameters are also influenced by the screen exposure duration associated with the use of electronic devices. Screen Exposure Time (SET) also has an effect on metabolism due to sedentary nature of the activity. Both SET and disrupted sleep are related with cognitive performance. Children are affected by sleep disruption and prolonged SET. Efforts to ameliorate in a primordial age may be more effective to reduce their predisposition to unhealthy BMI and detrimental changes of cognitive performance. In order to mitigate the scourge of unhealthy BMI prevalent in developing countries and to improve cognitive performance, it is important to administer proper sleep duration and SET. It is necessary to delineate an optimum duration of sleep and identify the optimum duration of SET in this regard. SET equal to and beyond 2 hours/day lead to increase sleep debt and decline of cognitive performance. Rise in BMI is associated with increase in SET. Sleep duration of 6–7 hours among participants yields better cognitive performance than those with sleep duration below or above 6–7 hours.

KEYWORDS:

• Sleep parameters
• screen exposure time
• cognitive performance
• metabolic disorder
• school children

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to the parents of the children who provided consent for the study. We are grateful to the children who agreed to participate and completed the elaborate process.

Authors’ Contribution

Devashish Sen & Subhashis Sahu have contributed to the concept of the work.

Koumi Dutta has contributed to the concept of the work, data collection, analysis and manuscript writing.

Ruchira Mukherjee has contributed to the concept of the work, data collection and analysis.

Rittick Das and Abanti Chowdhury contributed to data collection and analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical Approval

The study was approved by Institutional Ethical Committee, Human IEC(H) of Presidency University, Kolkata. Guidelines mentioned in the Declaration of Helsinki were followed.

Additional information

Funding

The funding for this work has been provided from:SVMCM fellowship received by Koumi Dutta; Faculty Research and Development Fund and Faculty Research Group Fund of Presidency University, Kolkata, received by Professor Devashish Sen; Personal Research Grant and DST PURSE-II Kalyani University received by Dr. Subhashis Sahu.