Longer Sleep Tied to Oral Microbiome Diversity in Teens, With Marie-Rachelle Narcisse, PhD

A recent study linking oral microbiome diversity with long sleep in teenagers and young adults was presented at SLEEP 2025, the 39th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, in Seattle.

HCPLive spoke with investigator Marie-Rachelle Narcisse, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, on what these findings mean for early-life health trajectories.

“This relationship is important because our microbiome is a key component of the body's immune and metabolic system in adolescence,” Narcisse said. “This finding could have implications for preventing chronic diseases that often originate early in life, such as obesity, diabetes, mental health disorders. So, if sleep influences these microbial patterns, this could potentially shape health trajectories for many years to come.”

Evidence has shown that reduced microbial diversity has been associated with chronic physical and mental health conditions, although these studies have mostly been small-scale, focused on the gut microbiome, and involved children or adults. Narcisse and colleagues sought to examine associations of oral microbiome diversity with sleep duration among 1332 US adolescents and young adults.

Using cross-sectional data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 2011 – 2012), the team collected data on oral microbiome alpha (α) diversity measures of richness and evenness: observed operational taxonomic units (OTU), faith’s phylogenetic diversity (FPD), Shannon-Weiner index (SWI), and Inverse Simpson index (ISI). Sleep exposure variables examined included self-reported sleep hours on weekdays or school/workdays categorized as either very short, short, healthy, or long.

The sample had 50.5% females and a mean age of 20.9 years, with 463 adolescents aged 16 – 18 years and 869 young adults aged 19 – 26 years. Half of the teenagers (5 in 10; 50.6%) reported receiving the recommended hours of sleep (8 – 10 hours), and 6 in 10 young adults (61.2%) reported receiving the recommended hours of sleep (7 – 9 hours).

For the oral microbiome alpha diversity measures, the OUT was 128.0 (95% confidence interval [CI], 122.35 – 133.64), the FPD mean was 14.24 (95%; 13.87 – 14.62), the SWI mean was 4.61 (95% CI, 4.54 – 4.67), and the ISI mean was 0.90 (95% CI, 0.89 – 0.90).

The analysis showed that compared with those who had a healthy sleep duration, teenagers and young adults with long sleep duration (3%) had signficantly greater oral microbiome diversity, indicated by OUT (43.0; 95% CI, 22.3 – 63.72), FPD (2.96; 95% CI, 1.16 – 4.76), and SWI (0.64; 95% CI, 0.07 – 1.21) metrics. The study found no significant association between ISI and sleep duration. The study ultimately demonstrated that the oral microbiome was positively associated with long sleep duration among teenagers and young adults.

“Using multiple indices of the old microbiome allow us to have a more comprehensive view of the microbiome diversity,” Narcisse said. “So, what could this mean? It could mean that longer sleep duration is associated with a more diverse and phylogenetically broad microbial environment, and so for clinicians using multiple indices of the old microbiome diversity, they could have a more nuanced understanding of microbial health.”

Narcisse has no relevant reported disclosures.

References

Marie-Rachelle Narcisse, David Barker, Tsute Chen, Evangelia Morou, Kiara Medeiros, Mary Carskadon, 0360 Associations of Sleep and Oral Microbiome Among Adolescents and Young Adults in the United States, Sleep, Volume 48, Issue Supplement_1, May 2025, Page A157, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaf090.0360