Care For Your Sleep

Archive for April, 2011

Many parents suffer because their infants and toddlers can’t go to sleep on time, can’t fall asleep or want to sleep in the parents’ bed. Many moms and dads tent to blame themselves for such “habits” of their toddlers. Or, they believe, there can be genetic causes of this problem as moms and dads also tend to go to sleep late and can’t fall asleep sometimes. However, according to the findings of a study carried out by a group of Italian specialists the secret most likely is in the specifics of the sleeping environment that moms and dads choose for their babies. Let’s take a closer look at the conclusions and finding of this research which were published recently in an online version of the Journal Pediatrics.

Italian specialists found out an interesting strategy to study sleep patterns of children and toddlers. They studied the sleep and the sleeping environment of 127 pairs of identical twins and 187 pairs of fraternal twins, who presumably shared the same environment while sleeping. Also, the scientists interviewed their parents on the following issues:  do twins like sleeping in their own room or rather in parents’ room, do they like having daytime naps, do they fall asleep easily and so on.

Here is a brief summary of the findings:

• All studied pairs of twins, both identical and fraternal, sleep in average 9.7 hours at night and complement their night sleeps with 2.1 hour of day sleep.
• About 53% of all twin pairs sleep in their parents’ room.
• Genetics had nothing to do with toddlers who tend to rather sleep in the room with their parents. However, the scientists are convinced that genetics plays a role in children waking up at night. Only 19% of fraternal twins were reported waking up at night (up to 6-7 times), at that 31% identical twins were reported to do so.

Similar results were received earlier by Canadian and Japanese scientists. The best thing about these scientific explanations are the true fact that if you suffer from your child’s sleeplessness at night, you should start changing the sleeping environment of your child, like the color of the bedroom, the location of the child’s bed, or trying to make him fall asleep in another room, etc. This way there are chances that your child’s sleep routine will improve.

It is possible to say that childhood cancer survivors are very special people because they are both very lucky and very unlucky. It’s a great luck to survive any type of this terrible disease, and at the same time its a great misfortune to live all difficulties and sadness of cancer in the childhood. Certainly, such conditions are supposed to have not only psychological consequences, but also other serious prolonged outcomes. Those include fatigue, attention and memory problems, sensitivity, and many others. According to recent study, published recently in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, impaired cognitive health and constant sleep problems are very common among childhood cancer survivors.

The conclusions were based on interviewing about 1,426 people who survived various types of childhood cancer between 1970 and 1986. All of them were treated and later on supervised by the specialists of the Childhood Cancer Survivor Center which was the main institution responsible for the study. Other experts were invited, including Kevin Krull, of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

According to the publication, about 20% of the childhood cancer survivors had certain cognitive health problems, mainly impaired memory and attention losses. At that, the specialists found out that those patients who reported about poor sleep, chronic insomnia and fatigue, are from three to four times at higher risks of suffering from attention and memory problems than the survivors that have no sleep disorders. Besides, it seems that the mentioned cognitive problems are not linked to the effects of chemotherapy, radiation, as well as the age of the patient. “These findings suggest that improved sleep quality and reduced fatigue may help to improve attention and memory functions in survivors,” Dr. Krull comments on the findings of the research.