Loading...
A 10-week remote monitoring study of sleep features and their variability in individuals with and without ADHD
Denyer, Hayley Carr, Ewan Deng, Qigang Asherson, Philip Bilbow, Andrea Folarin, Amos Groom, Madeleine J Hollis, Chris P Sankesara, Heet Dobson, Richard JB
Denyer, Hayley
Carr, Ewan
Deng, Qigang
Asherson, Philip
Bilbow, Andrea
Folarin, Amos
Groom, Madeleine J
Hollis, Chris P
Sankesara, Heet
Dobson, Richard JB
Abstract
BACKGROUND: People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often report disturbed sleep, as well as co-occurring symptoms of anxiety and depression. Yet studies employing objective assessments often do not show as many sleep disturbances compared to subjective measures. These discrepancies may relate to subjective reports capturing problematic nights, which may not be captured in a single night's sleep or by averaging objective measurements over several nights. Given that variability in behaviours is in general strongly linked to ADHD, individuals with ADHD could have greater sleep variability than individuals without ADHD. Using active and passive remote monitoring, we investigate differences in the level and variability of daily sleep behaviours between individuals with and without ADHD and explore if sleep is associated with changes in anxiety and depressive symptoms across a 10-week remote monitoring period. METHODS: Forty individuals (20 with ADHD, 20 without) took part in a 10-week remote monitoring study. Active monitoring involved participants completing questionnaires on ADHD and co-occurring psychiatric symptoms at weeks 2, 6 and 10. Passive monitoring involved participants wearing a wearable device (Fitbit) that measured sleep each night. RESULTS: Individuals with and without ADHD were similar in the levels of sleep recorded each night. However, compared to those without ADHD, participants with ADHD had more variable sleep duration, sleep onset and offset, and sleep efficiency over 10 weeks. Within-individual associations of co-occurring anxiety and depressive symptoms with the sleep features were non-significant. CONCLUSIONS: In a 10-week remote monitoring study of sleep using a wearable device, we show that what distinguishes individuals with ADHD from those without is their greater variability in sleep features: participants with ADHD had a more variable sleep duration, sleep onset and offset, and sleep efficiency. Inconsistency and high variability are hallmarks of ADHD, and we show that this characteristic extends also to sleep among adolescents and adults with ADHD. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical trial number: not applicable.
MIDER Authors
Affiliations
Citations
Altmetric:
Date
2025-03-25
Type
Article
Collections
Files
Loading...
Denyer 2025 1-10.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.3 MB
Citation
Denyer H, Carr E, Deng Q, Asherson P, Bilbow A, Folarin A, Groom MJ, Hollis C, Sankesara H, Dobson RJ, Kuntsi J. A 10-week remote monitoring study of sleep features and their variability in individuals with and without ADHD. BMC Psychiatry. 2025 Mar 27;25(1):294. doi: 10.1186/s12888-025-06729-z.
Journal / Source Title
DOI
PMID
Publisher
Publisher’s URL
Publisher’s statement
© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you
give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the
licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or
other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the
material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or
exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creati
vecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/