Children Consuming Caffeine Show Altered Sleep and Brain Structure Differences
Higher caffeine consumption among children aged nine to 11 is associated with reduced sleep duration and smaller cortical surface area across multiple brain regions, according to a study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging and reported by Technology Networks. Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London analyzed data from 9,632 children participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.
MRI Scans Reveal Structural Cortex Differences Linked to Soft Drink Consumption
Magnetic resonance imaging scans showed that greater caffeine intake correlates with lower surface area across the cortex, which is the brain’s folded outer layer responsible for cognitive processing, decision-making, attention, and emotions. This pattern appeared across 22 separate regions spanning all four lobes of the brain, even after researchers adjusted for household socioeconomic factors such as parental income and education. These structural differences emerged with a consumption level as low as one caffeinated drink per week. Soft drinks served as the primary source of caffeine among the participants in the study.
Caffeine is such a normal part of daily life that it’s easy to forget young people are consuming it too,
said Dr Divyangana Rakesh, senior author of the study and senior lecturer in neuroscience and psychology at IoPPN. Studies have found that two-thirds of adolescents consume caffeine at least once a week. Despite it being a psychoactive substance, it is completely unregulated.
Shorter Sleep Connects Caffeine Intake to Later Behavioral and Mood Issues
The investigation examined the pathway connecting caffeine intake to alterations in brain structure and mental health. Children who ingested more caffeine slept less, which linked directly to a smaller cortical surface area. Reduced sleep duration and lower surface area together partially accounted for the association between higher caffeine intake and increased mental health problems reported six months later, including difficulties with attention, mood, and behavior. By the 18-month follow-up evaluation, only the association involving overall cortical surface area remained statistically significant.
We found that even fairly low levels of intake were linked to small differences in brain structure and later mental health, and lower sleep duration seems to be an important underlying link,
Dr Rakesh stated. Although we cannot comment on causality, our results do suggest that both caffeine intake, including from soft drinks, and sleep are worth paying attention to when we think about young people’s mental health.
Researchers Acknowledge Confounding Lifestyle Factors in Youth Caffeine Habits
Additional research from PMC and MDPI studies notes that caffeine acts as a non-specific, competitive antagonist of adenosine receptors, reducing excitatory neurotransmission and affecting sleep homeostasis. Those studies found that regular caffeine consumption in children and adolescents aged 10 to 16 is associated with later bedtimes, less time in bed, and reduced slow-wave activity (SWA) during the beginning of the night—a key physiological marker of deep sleep depth.
King’s College London researchers emphasize that isolating the specific neurobiological impacts of caffeine remains challenging due to concurrent dietary and behavioral patterns associated with soft drink consumption. Soft drinks contain a lot of sugar and often go hand in hand with less healthy lifestyle habits and more risk-taking behaviours, so we can’t yet separate the role of caffeine from everything else that comes with them,
said Jiayi Zheng, first author of the study from IoPPN. That’s the next question we want to answer, ideally with more precise measures of what young people drink, when they drink it and how well they sleep.
Worth a look