One in 10 infants and toddlers have problems sleeping at night and may be at greater risk of developing a sleep disorder as they get older, a new study suggests.
The new research is a rare look at a problem that many parents and even pediatricians sometimes fail to notice. The study, which looked at children ages 6 months to 3 years, found that sleep problems were common in this age group. But parents did not always perceive red flags like loud and frequent snoring — which can be a risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea, a potentially serious breathing disorder — as problems that warranted mentioning to their pediatricians.
The findings also challenged a widespread notion that children who have sleep troubles early on tend to outgrow them. In the study, children who had one or more sleep problems at any point in early childhood were three to five times as likely to have a sleep problem later on.
“The data indicate that sleep problems in children are not an isolated phenomenon,” said Dr. Kelly Byars, an associate professor at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and an author of the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. “If you have it early and it’s not remedied, then it’s likely to continue over time.”
The warning signs of a disorder can vary widely. But some indicators of a potential problem in children are loud snoring several nights a week, frequent bouts of getting up in the middle of the night, nightmares or night terrors, and routinely taking longer than 20 minutes to fall asleep.
Although serious sleep issues are more often thought of as a problem of adulthood, the National Sleep Foundation estimates that up to 69 percent of children younger than 11 have a sleep-related problem of some kind. Many parents, though, do not know what to look for or how to distinguish a true sleep disorder from the normal challenges of putting an infant or child to bed.
Pediatricians, too, may also overlook a child’s nighttime troubles. One report found that roughly half of all pediatricians do not ask about or screen for sleep disturbances when talking to parents about the health of a toddler or infant.
Read more: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/fussy-baby-or-a-sleep-disorder/
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