( p apnea and how exercise can ameliorate...)Sleep Problems in Overweight Children Appear Fairly Common,Health

p apnea and how exercise can ameliorate sleep apnea.

To learn more about sleep patterns in overweight children, Dr. Davis has started a similar study using wristbands to record movement during sleep and fingertip pulse oximeters to measure oxygen levels.

Dr. Amy R. Blanchard, pulmonologist and director of the MCG Georgia Sleep Center, is working with Dr. Davis on the new study and hopes their monitoring approach will prove an effective, inexpensive and unobtrusive way to identify early problems.

"It may give us an early diagnosis of something that could potentially affect their outcome in many ways," says Dr. Blanchard who has been surprised by the amount of sleep disruption they've already seen in the children, some of whom are only slightly overweight. She notes that some may even be playing video games or watching television when they are supposed to be sleeping, further detracting from a good night's rest.

"Kids can have sleep apnea for a couple of reasons," she says. "A normal-weight child can have sleep apnea because they have big tonsils and adenoids and many times their problems can be cured with surgery."

Gaining weight can exacerbate sleep problems or even cause them by contributing to a narrowed airway, she says. The child lies down, throat muscles relax, the tongue falls back, the airway gets obstructed, oxygen levels may drop, the child is aroused and the cycle begins again. Snoring, present in essentially everyone with sleep apnea, results from the vibration of excess tissue – whether it's fat, large natural anatomy or both – as the child breathes in.

"The published study suggests we need to be looking more diligently at kids, not necessarily just kids with big tonsils who snore, but any child that is snoring or heavy," Dr. Blanchard says. "It's just like in adults, when doctors start asking their patients, they find a lot of people snore."

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