Did you know that sleep can play an important role in the development of mental health problems
in children? My name is Isabel Morales and I am a post-doctoral
Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki and also Honorary
Research Fellow here at the University of Birmingham at the Institute for Mental Health.
My fellowship is funded by the Academy of Finland and this allows me to conduct research
in Helsinki but also here in Birmingham. The topic of my fellowship is to study sleep
development in children and to investigate the associations between sleep problems and
mental health difficulties in children. To do this I have access to a large longitudinal
cohort that is based in Finland and the name of this cohort is the Child Sleep Cohort.
In this study they recruited around 1,400 mothers in Tampere, a city in Finland. They
recruited these mothers during pregnancy and they followed these mothers when the infant
was born and then as well at the age of 3 months, 8 months, 18 months and 24 months
and finally at the age of 5 years. We have information about the parent reported
data on sleep development and sleep problems at all these time points for the whole cohort,
but as well we have objective information using actigraph data on sleep development.
Actigraphy is a wristwatch that can be placed on the wrist or on the ankle and it provides
information about activity and inactivity patterns and using a specific algorithm we
can transform these activity and inactivity patterns into sleep/wake information. In addition
to this sleep information using subjective and objective data, we also have parent reported
information on several mental health problems, for example emotional and behavioural problems
or cognitive deficits. What we have found recently is that indeed several sleep problems
during very early stages of life are associated with behavioural and emotional problems at
the age of 2 years. More specifically for example, shorter sleep
and high frequency of night awakenings at the ages of 3 and 8 months already are longitudinally
associated with internalizing and dysregulation problems at the age of 2 years. Internalizing
problems refer for example to anxiety and depression symptoms while dysregulation refers
to the inability to control your own emotions and behaviours. In a similar way we have recently
published that shorter sleep at the age of 3 months already is longitudinally associated
with attention-deficit at the age of 5 years. The main message that I want to transmit here
is that sleep and mental health problems in children are not independent realities that
can be separated one from the other, but indeed they happen to appear together and correlate
to each other, and based on the findings of this study, we can suggest that indeed sleep
problems in very early stages of life precede, so they appear before, the development of
these mental health problems. So finally the next step that we should start
doing is to define better targeted sleep interventions in early childhood in order to see whether
we are able to address these earlier sleep difficulties or specific sleep problems at
these very early stages of life and if this can prevent or ameliorate the development
of future mental health problems.
Youtube: Did you know that sleep can play an important role in the development of mental
health problems in children? Dr Isabel Morales- Munoz, a researcher at the Institute for Mental
Health, University of Birmingham, explains why we need to intervene and address sleep
problems in early childhood in order to help prevent mental health difficulties from developing
in the future.