Overweight Children at Increased Risk of Sleep Apnea
A new study has highlighted a potential connection between obesity, bedwetting and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in children.
Researchers say that while being overweight and wetting the bed appear to have no causal relationship to each other, both are symptoms associated with the nighttime breathing disorder.
Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by pauses in breathing during sleep. Each episode, known as an apnea, lasts long enough to cause the patient to miss one or more breaths, or usually a minimum of at least 10 seconds. Individuals suffering from sleep apnea are typically unaware that they having difficulty breathing, even upon awakening.
For the recent study, Dr. Joseph G. Barone and his colleagues at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey conducted overnight sleep studies on children between the ages of 5 and 15, 149 of which suffered from OSA with another 139 matched control children who did not have the disorder.
The researchers then combined the data accumulated from the sleep tests with information on the children obtained from medical records, including age, gender, height, weight, frequency of bedwetting, history of snoring, diabetes, nasal allergies, and/or enlarged tonsils.
Barone and his colleagues reported finding a statistically significant relationship between both bedwetting and obesity in children with OSA.
The team observed that children who had frequent problems with bedwetting were five times more likely to suffer from OSA, while being overweight increased the likelihood of having the chronic sleep disorder by fourfold. Researchers, however, observed no connection between bedwetting and being overweight, indicating that the two factors likely function independently of each other whatever their relation to OSA may be.
Barone’s team has advised pediatricians to look in the possibility of OSA in overweight children who wet the bed, especially if they show other symptoms of OSA or fail to respond to standard bedwetting treatments.
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