It’s nothing sweeter than a sleeping baby and it can also be pretty adorable enough to hear your troubled baby snoring occasionally.
But if your child snores a few days a week, that should be a big concern, according to a new large study. The research, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, found a link between frequent snoring and structural changes in the brain in children, as well as behavioral problems such as hyperactivity and inattention.
The researchers looked at data from the brain MRI images of more than 10,000 children between the ages of 9 and 10 in the United States, as well as data from the parents of those children about their children’s snoring frequency and standard checklists used to measure several different areas of childhood behavior.
The researchers found that children who snore regularly – three or more times a week – had thinner gray matter in several areas of the brain, including those that help manage reasoning and impulse control.
These are the parts of the brain responsible for behavioral regulation. “It applies to maintaining attention and what we call ‘cognitive flexibility,’ which is basically regulating one’s own behavior,” said researcher Dr. Amal Isaiah, an associate professor of otorhinolaryngology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. HuffPost.
Frequent snoring also tended to show an increasing severity of “problematic behaviors,” he added.
“I cannot say that there is a cause and effect here,” Isaiah said. “But from a biological perspective, if you think about snoring, it means that the air doesn’t flow freely.” This could mean that children either wake up frequently or could change the way children’s blood carries oxygen to the brain, which would mean that they are not saturated with it. And either of these mechanisms (or both) may be behind the link between changes in brain structure and children’s behavior, he hypothesized.
Estimates suggest that almost 30% of children snore minor occasionally, while somewhere between 10% and 12% of children experience primary snoring – or snoring that occurs more than two nights a week and occurs frequently throughout the night. . A smaller percentage of children experience obstructive sleep apnea, which is a more severe sleep disorder that causes a person to stop repeatedly and begin to breathe while sleeping.
The new findings are not the first to link snoring to brain changes and potential behavioral problems in children, but it is the largest study to date to confirm the connection, Isaiah said.
He noted that the findings significantly strengthen the guidance of the American Academy of Pediatrics that parents should take their children’s snoring seriously.
The group has long said that it is important for parents and caregivers of frequent snoring to talk to their child’s health care provider because it can be so disruptive to their sleep that children depend on them in so many ways.
And, as with adults, snoring in children can be treated. In some cases, it requires surgery to remove a child’s tonsils and adenoids, which can obstruct the airways. In other cases, simple changes in a child’s sleep environment may be enough to help improve snoring or at least reduce the likelihood that children will be adversely affected by fragmented sleep. These types of changes can really be quite simple, such as establishing a consistent sleep schedule and arranging children’s bedrooms to be as quiet and comfortable as possible, says the Sleep Foundation.
In the end, the message for snoring parents is not to panic, but also not to ignore the problem altogether.
“You don’t have to run for treatment right now, but it’s something you should pick up with your pediatrician,” Isaiah said.