Night-to-night variability of objective sleep outcomes in youth Middle Eastern football players.

Objective: To describe components of night-to-night variation in objective measures of sleep.
Methods: We conducted a secondary data analysis of consecutive and chronologically ordered actigraphy-based measurements for time in bed (min), time asleep (min), and wake-after-sleep onset (min). This investigation examined 575 individual night-based measures available for a sub-sample of fifty-two, male youth Middle Eastern football players tracked over a 14-day surveillance period (chronological age range: 12.1 to 16 years). Distinct multivariable-adjusted generalized additive models included each objective sleep outcome measure as dependent variable and disaggregated components of variation for night measurement-by-sleep period interaction, week part (weekday or weekend), and study participant random effects from within-subject night-to-night sleep variation.
Results: The within-subject standard deviation (SD) of ±98 min (95% confidence interval [CI], 92 to 104 min) for time in bed, ±87 min (95%CI, 82 to 93 min) for time asleep, and ±23 min (95%CI, 22 to 25 min) for wake-after-sleep-onset overwhelmed other sources of variability and accounted for ∼44% to 53% of the overall night-to-night variation. The night measurement-by-fragmented sleep period interaction SD was ±83 min (95%CI, 44 to 156 min) for time in bed, ±67 min (95%CI, 34 to 131 min) for time asleep, and ±15 min (95%CI, 7 to 32 min) for wake-after-sleep-onset that accounted for ∼22% to 32% of each sleep outcome measure overall variability.
Conclusions: Substantial random night-to-night within-subject variability poses additional challenges for strategies aiming to mitigate problems of insufficient and inconsistent sleep that are detrimental to school learning and youth athlete development processes.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)