Lack of sleep makes children fat in adulthood, study shows

Dunedin, New Zealand, November 4: A new study has found that children who do not go to bed in time or stay up past their bedtimes are at increased risk of being overweight or obese in adulthood.

The researchers from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand, followed 1,037 children born in Dunedin between 1972 and 1973. The scientists noted the subjects’ time in bed every two years between ages 5 and 11 and measured body weight at age 32.

The study, which appear in the United States journal Pediatrics, found that children in between the ages of 5 to 11 years who spent less time in bed were about 5 percent more likely to be obese by age 32. In general they found that as childhood sleep time declined, adulthood body mass indexdefine (BMI) climbed.

Lead author of the study, Erik Landhuis said that everybody knows the importance of a good night’s sleep and various studies have shown that sleep-deprived adults and children are at greater risk of being overweight but this was the first ever study conducted to show the potential implications for obesity in the adulthood from lack of sleep during childhood.

Adding further he said, "It is not clear why lack of sleep might lead to weight gain, but experimental studies have shown that sleep deprivation may disrupt the hormonesdefine that regulate appetite. It has also been suggested that tired kids may simply have less energy and are therefore less active.”

The senior author of the study, Dr. Robert John Hancox, said, "Although we cannot prove that this is a cause-and-effect relationship," he added, "this study provides strong evidence that it probably is."

Researchers said that the world wide trends showed that children in today’s world are getting less sleep than the generations before them did (kids going to bed 2 hours later than 20 years ago) and that could be leading to the rise in obesity.

The study was funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends 14-15 hours sleep for babies in the age group of 3 to eleven months, 12-14 hours daily sleep for toddlers, 11-13 hours daily sleep for preschoolers, 10-12 hours for elementary school students, 9-11 hours for pre-teens. Adolescents are advised to get nine hours of nightly sleep and adults seven to eight hours.

Obesity is a gateway to heart disease, type 2 diabetesdefine and a host of other diseases including, hypertension and stroke, gallstones and some cancers and is the second leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States.

More than 127 million adults in the United States are overweight, 60 million obese, and 9 million severely obese while in New Zealand in 2002/3 one in three adults was overweight (excluding obese) and one in five adults was obese.