Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Does your child snore?

Having a parent who snores almost triples the risk of a child becoming a snorer

SNORING? Find out why

Snoring may be genetic. Children who snore are almost three times as likely as others to have parents who snore. And snoring and sleep-disordered breathing are twice as common in children who test positive for allergies.

Sleep-disordered breathing — snoring is one symptom of it — is associated with poor school performance, cardiovascular troubles and daytime behavioural problems like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Researchers studied 1-year-old children participating in the Cincinnati Childhood Allergy and Air Pollution Study. Among the 681 children, 105 were habitual snorers — that is, they snored more than three nights a week. The children were also examined for allergies to various foods using a skin-prick test.

Having a positive allergy test almost doubled the risk for snoring, and having one parent who snored almost tripled the risk. The results were published in the journal Chest.

"If you have a child who snores frequently or loudly," said Dr. Maninder Kalra, an author of the study, "we recommend evaluation by a sleep specialist." Treatment for sleep-disordered breathing in children may involve surgery to remove enlarged tonsils or adenoids, or the use of a breathing device during sleep. Sleep-disordered breathing can be definitively diagnosed only in a sleep laboratory, and the authors point out that one limitation of their study is that they did not perform this definitive test on each child. Further, the research relied on the reporting of parents, which may not have always been accurate. — NYT

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail