Lack of Sleep May Put Young Kids At Risk of Obesity

Childhood Obesity

Children under the age of five who don't get enough sleep at night are more likely than kids who do get their 40 winks to become obese at a young age, a study published Monday showed. "We found a robust longitudinal association between duration of night time sleep in early life and subsequent obesity measured at five to nine years," wrote the authors of the study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers led by Janice Bell of the University of Washington, Seattle and Frederick Zimmerman of the University of California, Los Angeles, studied two lots of data -- at baseline and five years later -- for 1,930 children in the United States. The kids were separated into two groups for the study: ages zero to 59 months, and five to 13 years. The data analyzed included information known to influence whether a child develops obesity, including parents' weight and the child's physical activity level, as well as how long the children slept at night and whether they napped during the day.

On average, younger children in the study slept 10 hours a night, and older children slept around 9.5 hours, but some children in both age cohorts got as little as five hours' sleep a night. The data collected five years after baseline showed that 33 percent of the younger cohort and 36 percent of the older cohort of kids were overweight or obese.

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