New Findings on Sleep in Children, Older Adults

13 March 2012

A mother and her baby play.

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

"Sleep-disordered breathing" is a term for a group of conditions that can interfere with normal breathing while people sleep. These include snoring, mouth-breathing and sleep apnea. Sleep-disordered breathing can do more than just leave people feeling tired the next day. It can also affect people's health. In children the effects can include behavioral and emotional problems.

In a new study, researchers asked parents about their children's breathing from when they were babies up to about age six. The parents also answered questions about behavior at ages four and seven. The study involved about eleven thousand children.

Karen Bonuck at the Einstein College of Medicine in New York led the study.

KAREN BONUCK: "The central finding overall is that sleep-disordered breathing is associated with a fifty percent increase in adverse neurobehavioral outcomes."

Those problems include hyperactivity, aggressiveness and problems relating to other children.

Ms. Bonuck says the more serious the breathing problems, the more serious the behavioral issues were likely to be. Other studies have linked sleep with children's behavior, but this study was extensive enough to reject other possible causes.

The study appears in the journal Pediatrics. An estimated one child in ten snores regularly. A smaller number suffer from other sleep-disordered breathing.