Study: Sleep-disordered breathing swells in the summer months

Summertime may spell sleep complications for children with seasonal allergies. Some children develop temporary sleep-disordered breathing similar to sleep apnea about the time school gets out.

The results of a study (#0392) featured at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC, may lead to new treatment strategies.

Sleep-disordered breathing in elementary school-aged children tended to continually increase from June to September before steeply dropping off in November.

Parents of 687 children in grades K-5 filled out questionnaires before each of their children underwent overnight sleep studies in a sleep laboratory in June. The authors continued to observe the children through November.

Children who had one to five breathing pauses per hour of sleep had mild sleep-disordered breathing. The frequency of these cases escalated each month. The authors included controls in the study for factors such as age, body mass index, gender and race.

It’s unclear which allergies may contribute to mild sleep-disordered breathing. Identifying and minimizing the allergic responses through medicine may alleviate the symptoms.

Past research suggests nasal problems such as chronic sinusitis and rhinitis are risk factors for mild sleep-disordered breathing.

Image by Grant MacDonald

Early bedtime benefits: young children who sleep more score higher in school

Setting bedtime rules encourages the healthy development of preschool-aged children. In an abstract (#0040) being presented at SLEEP 2010 in San Antonio, children who had a regular bedtime scored higher on language, reading and math assessments.

Earlier bedtimes were linked to higher scores in most of the developmental measures.

Children who slept less than 11 hours per night, the AASM’s recommended minimum for preschoolers, scored lower on phonological awareness, literacy and early math skills. Insufficient sleep may hurt a child’s development and school achievement.

The findings were based on a sample of 8,000 children assessed in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort. The longitudinal study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics followed children’s health, development, care and education from birth to the start of kindergarten.

In the government study parents reported usual bedtime and wake time. The children took a shortened set of items from standardized assessments to determine developmental outcomes.

The principal author of the study recommends parents help their preschooler get healthy sleep and encourage development by setting a regularly bedtime and establishing routines such as bedtime readings or stories.

Image by Sarah Gilbert

Sleepwalking into adolescence: parasomnias tend to persist past childhood

Childhood parasomnias like sleepwalking or bedwetting don’t necessarily stop at adolescence. The remission rates for these pediatric problems are actually quite low heading into the teenage years.

The research abstract (#251), presented as a poster today at SLEEP 2010, compared parasomnias incidents rates for children ages 6 to 11 over the course of less than five years.

The children’s parents completed comprehensive sleep habits surveys at the beginning and end points of the study.

Results show the remission rate for children with sleepwalking was only 1.9 percent after five years. Remission rates remained low for bedwetting (5.2 percent), sleep terrors (4.8 percent) and sleep talking (3.5).

Sleep talking was the most common parasomnia for adolescents. 22.3 percent of parents reported their child talked in his or her sleep. 15.2 percent of those cases were new.

The incidence rate was 2.6 percent for new cases of sleep terrors, and less than one percent for both bedwetting and sleepwalking.

Learn more about sleepwalking. bedwetting and nightmares at sleepeducation.com