War Against Childhood Obesity

A New Weapon in the War Against Childhood Obesity: Sleep!

Well-rested kids generally perform better in school, but new research suggests that catching 40 winks may also turbo-charge metabolism to help fight obesity.

Children who get more sleep, even if it's only "catch-up" sleep on weekends, may be winners in the war against obesity.

A study conducted among more than 300 children ages four to 10, found that those who slept the least and had the most irregular sleep schedules were almost five times more likely to be obese, according to Dr. David Gozal of the University of Chicago.

Short nights and variable sleep patterns were also linked to early signs of diabetes and heart disease, according to the study, which was published online in Pediatrics.

Kids who slept the least had higher levels of LDL (bad), signs that they weren’t metabolizing sugars efficiently, and increased blood levels of an inflammatory marker — C-reactive protein, which has been linked to risk of heart attacks.

Busy weekday schedules often cut into kids’ sleep time, but Gozal’s team found that there is a work around for this problem — extra sleep on the weekends lowered the kids' risk of obesity to less than 2.2-fold excess, the group wrote.

Moreover, even just an extra half hour of sleep per night might lower body mass index (BMI) and reduce the metabolic effects that predispose to diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life, they proposed.

The most likely explanation for the sleep-obesity link is that losing sleep affects appetite triggers — neuropeptides called ghrelin and leptin — which may lead to more eating and obesity, Gozal's group explained.

There are plenty of other good reasons not to shortchange kids on sleep, Gozal added in an interview.

"If you want your child to be happy and to succeed, prioritize sleep," he told MedPage Today.
"Optimal sleep is associated with better attention, better ability to learn, and better memory," he explained. "There are a lot of advantages about sticking to a regular bedtime routine with appropriate time being allowed for the child to sleep."

Although the observational study couldn't draw causal links between sleep and weight or metabolism — or show a benefit from increasing sleep in kids who initially didn't get enough — there's plenty of evidence from prior research to suggest that both are the case, according to Gozal.

The researchers monitored the sleep patterns among 308 healthy children ages 4 to 10. The kids, recruited from public schools in Louisville, Ky., monitored for a week. Gozal said the children in the study were considered representative of the general school population.

The kids averaged about eight hours of sleep per night overall, regardless of weight or school week versus weekend — an amount substantially below the recommended nine to 10 hours of sleep per night, Gozal noted.

But the kids' patterns of sleep differed by weight class. Obese children slept less and less as the week progressed — reaching a significant low on the weekends.

Consistently long sleep in the recommended range of about 9.5 hours on both weekdays and weekends was associated with the healthiest metabolic profile.

"In other words, the longer and more-stable sleep duration is, the less likely a child is to manifest metabolic dysfunction," the researchers concluded in the paper.

Gozal and colleagues cautioned that the study only measured sleep over one week representing a typical school week and longer studies that include holidays and vacations might be more accurate in predicting associations.

Other limitations were lack of measurements of body fat distribution and the predominantly non-Hispanic white make-up of the Louisville school-age population — which may limit generalizability of the results to more diverse areas, they noted.

http://www.everydayhealth.com/kids-health/news/new-weapon-in-war-against-childhood-obesity-sleep.aspx

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