Focus is needed on not just the duration of sleep a person gets but also on the quality of sleep, said doctors at the webinar on sleep disruptions among children organised as part of The Hindu’s Wellness Series on Saturday.
The webinar on the topic “Rock-a-bye Baby - Sleep disruptions in children - a slow pandemic” was organised in partnership with WeLittle Hospital.
Addressing the webinar, Umakanth Katwa, Instructor of Paediatrics, Harvard Medical School, said that both the duration and the quality of sleep were crucial for overall wellbeing of people.
He said that sleep related issues faced by people have worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic and pointed out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. has declared insufficient sleep to be a public health epidemic.
Highlighting that sleep loss could affect all age groups, including children, Dr. Katwa said that this could in turn affect their learning, memory, cognition and development. “This can have an impact on the rest of their lives,” he said.
He said that there was now a push to include the requirement of adequate sleep in the National Health Policy of India as the revision to the policy in 2017 failed to include sleep.
Shifa Shamsudeen, a preventive paediatric dentist and the founder and director of WeLittle, spoke on the importance of nasal breathing among children and its impact on craniofacial development and their overall health.
She said that while there was awareness about nutritional and educational requirements of the children, the awareness on quality of sleep was inadequate. She added that even the inadequate awareness was largely about the quantity of sleep a child should get and not on the quality.
She said that snoring, breathing via mouth, choking or snorting arousals, restless sleeping, grinding of teeth, periodic limb movement and waking up frequently are some of the common symptoms parents can look for among children. She said that lack of quality of sleep can manifest as fatigue, aggressiveness and irritability observed in children during the day.
“We should always remember that mouth is to eat and nose is to breathe,” she said. Stating that early identification of sleep disruptions and improper breathing through mouth can help addressing the problem easily, she pointed out that hundreds of children who visited the hospital have benefitted through orofacial myofunctional therapy.
