BALTIMORE — Both increased weight and sleep problems were associated with children's reports of poor quality of life, based on results from a study of 100 children aged 8–12 years.
Previous studies have linked poor quality of life to overweight and to sleep problems in children but this study is one of the few to investigate the joint contribution of weight and sleep to quality of life, said Kelly Ann Davis, who presented the results in a poster at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
Ms. Davis and her colleagues used several types of statistical analysis to determine whether there were significant differences in sleep patterns for children in three different weight categories as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—healthy, overweight, or obese. Parents and children completed the Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire, the Pediatric Sleep Questionnaire, and the Pediatric Quality of Life 4.0. Each child's height and weight was measured by a health care professional.
In a logistic regression analysis, both sleep and weight were significant predictors of poor scores on the child-reported measures of psychosocial function and total quality of life, accounting for 48% and 33% of the variance, respectively, Ms. Davis, a research technician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an interview. In addition, weight, but not sleep, was a significant predictor of low scores on child-reported physical function tests, accounting for 23% of the variance.
In a breakdown of the children's sleep patterns, the researchers found that obese children had significantly more symptoms of sleep-disordered breathing, compared with both overweight and healthy weight children, and both obese and overweight children had significantly more symptoms of excessive daytime sleepiness, compared with healthy weight children. In addition, overweight children had significantly longer sleep duration and significantly longer sleep onset latency, compared with healthy weight children.
Sleep was not a significant predictor of low scores on parent-reported measures of the child's quality of life. Increased weight was the only significant predictor of low scores, and it accounted for 11% of the variance in physical function scores and 12% of the variance in both psychological function scores and total quality of life scores.
“It is important for health care professionals to be aware of the association between weight and sleep and ask parents of overweight children about their child's sleep,” Ms. Davis wrote.
Ms. Davis reported that she had no financial conflicts to disclose.