Infant development linked to sleep habits
Babies who fail to get enough sleep or are plagued by persistent snoring are more likely to experience some developmental delays by age two than other infants, new University of Alberta-led research has found.
In particular, nighttime sleep duration was found to have the greatest influence on early childhood learning, according to the study that followed the progress of hundreds of Edmonton-area children.
“It’s not a mystery that if you have poor sleep or poor sleep quality like snoring, you are going to have difficulty with learning and behaviour,” senior author Dr. Piush Mandhane said Monday. “The question is really how bad does it need to be before you start to see those occurring, and is there a long-term effect on children?”
The findings are detailed in two separate papers published in the June issue of Sleep Medicine. The research is part of the broader Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study, which has tracked 3,500 children born between 2009 and 2012 in Edmonton, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Toronto.
For the latest project, Mandhane and his team analyzed sleep pattern data from the 800 children in the Edmonton area to gain a better understanding of the effects likely to show up by a child’s second birthday.
“It is really starting to show that very young children are influenced significantly by sleep duration and disruption,” said Mandhane, a University of Alberta pediatrics professor.
The team discovered that children who regularly slept less than 12 hours a day tended to have inferior cognitive and language skills by age two. The disparity was particularly pronounced for poor nighttime sleepers.
“We were surprised at the magnitude of the effect,” Mandhane said.
Scholars also looked at disrupted sleep behaviour, finding that persistent snoring was associated with poorer language skills but had no effect on general cognitive development.
Mandhane said further study is needed to determine why snoring seems to affect one skill and not the other.