Sleep is important for physical and mental health as well as overall well-being
it supports many processes including learning memory and attention
in children without epilepsy sleep problems occur up to a rate of 40 in early childhood however in
children with epilepsy these rates can be higher and have a worse impact on their diagnosis
despite this the importance of good sleep is not yet fully acknowledged or understood despite
it being an important determinant of quality of life in children with epilepsy and their families
my name is Alice Winsor and I am a PhD student here at the centre for human brain health
investigating the relationship between sleep and quality of life in children with epilepsy
our project is supported by the Waterloo Foundation and looks at two primary aims
the first is to really understand how does sleep affect and how is it affected by
daytime function behaviour and quality of life the second aim is to really look into the
electrophysiological aspect of epilepsy so the brain activity and its relationship with sleep
we understand that sleep and epilepsy have a bidirectional relationship
on one side sleep can impact epilepsy so children who do not achieve enough sleep are more
vulnerable to further seizures and so therefore poor sleep acts as a precipitating factor
now there are various reasons for poor sleep one can be poor sleep hygiene or possibly more of an
underlying medical reason such as sleep disorders which in the case of children with epilepsy these
are highly common and they often go undetected on the other branch of this relationship epilepsy can
impact sleep so nocturnal seizures can affect the continuity during the sleep cycle causing children
to wake up during the night but also there's evidence that suggests that even in children with
seizures during the day there is still an impact on their sleep highlighting more of
that intrinsic effect of epilepsy and its impact on the brain on sleep there are also factors such
as epilepsy medication which can either improve or decrease sleep depending on the type of medication
now as part of our research we are working with the two hospitals the Birmingham Children's
Hospital and Worcester Royal Hospital and here we are recruiting families whose children are going
in for a video EEG assessment and this is conducted while the child sleeps to identify
any seizures which may help to form an epilepsy diagnosis if families consent to take part in our
research they are required to complete a series of questionnaires assessing behaviour quality of life
and sleep in the child and in the parent as part of our study the child is also required to wear
a watch and this is a sleepwatch which records the child's sleep during the two-week period
and it really allows us to have a more deep understanding of their habitual sleep patterns
as part of this research we also have a meta-analysis
so a meta-analysis is a quantitative synthesis of different studies bringing together all these
different results to form set conclusions our meta analysis was really looking again
to form the foundation of our project to look at sleep in epilepsy and to compare these findings
with children without epilepsy this meta-analysis is now in the process of being published online
and we found really interesting results so with looking across different seat measures so
parent-reported seat measures the sleepwatch type of data and also EEG type of data so
again the brain activity during sleep we found that children with epilepsy had significantly
reduced total sleep time in comparison to children without epilepsy of around 34 minutes on average
we also found that they had reduced sleep quality and also experienced higher percentage of lighter
sleep highlighting that they're not achieving as much of that deep restorative sleep compared
to children without epilepsy and finally we found that the children with epilepsy
had significantly higher more frequent and more severe sleep problems in the domains
of night awakening parasomnias these are for example sleepwalking and sleep talking
and also sleep disordered breathing so I findings really highlighted that again children
with epilepsy are very much vulnerable to sleep patterns whether they're measured objectively and
subjectively and really pointed to that message that it does require clinical acknowledgement and
sleep problems should be screened at an early stage in the epilepsy diagnosis to improve
epilepsy management and epilepsy care and this can also have an area for future research to look to
investigating areas for intervention so if we improve sleep are we be able to improve seizure
control thank you for listening if you want to hear more about our research and what we do please
do go to my twitter page which is winsor_alice and also check out the centre for human brain
health website which highlights all the amazing research we do here at the university thank you