Chronic lack of sleep and sleep-related breathing problems in children may increase the risk that they will be obese later in life. This finding comes from data collected over 15 years on almost 1,900 English children.
Sleep-related breathing problems, also called sleep-disordered breathing, include both snoring and sleep apnea, where breathing occasionally stops during sleep.
Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx looked at data collected by the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) in Avon, England. ALSPAC collected information from parent questionnaires about how long their children slept and if they had sleep-disordered breathing symptoms for the first few years of the children's life. They also collected body mass index (BMI) data on the children from ALSPAC clinics.
The children who had the shortest sleep times at around age 5 and 6 had a 60% to 100% increased risk of being obese at age 15. However, children at other ages who did not sleep long did not experience a significant increase in risk. The researchers defined short sleep duration as getting less that 90% as much sleep as other children, or less than 10.5 hours of sleep a night.
The researchers found that the children with the worst symptoms of sleep-disordered breathing had the greatest risk of obesity. They were twice as likely to be obese by ages 7, 10, and 15 than were children with no symptoms of breathing problems during sleep.
However, although lack of sleep and sleep-related breathing issues in children both raised the risk of being obese later in life, the effects were independent of each other. There was little evidence that a child with one risk factor was more likely to be affected by the other.
The study found an association between sleep issues and later obesity, but it is not clear whether the sleep problems cause the obesity or if something else is causing both the sleep problems and the obesity.
