Parents of Children With AD Suffer Related Sleep Loss

TOPLINE:

Parents of children with atopic dermatitis (AD) are less likely to achieve the recommended 7 hours of sleep and had a higher reliance on sleep medications, a study reports.

METHODOLOGY:

• Researchers analyzed data from the 2013-2018 National Health Interview Survey conducted via face-to-face surveys covering 35,000 civilian households annually.
• The analysis included 6,130,919 weighted participants with AD (mean age, 7.9 years) and 41,382,420 without AD (mean age, 8.4 years).
• Researchers assessed the associations between children with AD, parental sleep duration, and parental sleep medication use.

TAKEAWAY:

• A greater proportion of the parents of children with AD (45.2%) failed to meet the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s (AASM) 7-hour sleep recommendation compared with 37.1% of parents of children without AD (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.78; 95% CI, 0.72-0.85).
• The use of sleep medication in the past week was also more prevalent among parents of children with AD (13.3% vs 9.9%; aOR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.12-1.43).
• Parents of children aged 4 years or older and those who identified as White reported higher odds of not meeting sleep recommendations and relying on sleep aids.
• The likelihood of using sleep medications was also higher in parents aged 44 years or older and in mothers vs fathers of the children with AD.

IN PRACTICE:

“Our results indicate that parents of children with AD are less likely to achieve AASM recommendations for sleep, which may increase their risk for adverse health outcomes,” the authors wrote. “These findings offer the largest nationally representative assessment of this topic and serve to further underscore the indirect burden of AD,” they added.

SOURCE:

The study was led by Christopher G. Youn, Department of Dermatology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, and was published online on December 12 in Pediatric Dermatology.

LIMITATIONS:

Study limitations included the cross-sectional design, recall bias, and lack of data on AD severity. Also, information on amount of sleep loss and medications used was not available.

DISCLOSURES:

This work did not receive any specific funding. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.