Sleep Problems in the First Three Years of Life: A Wake-Up Call to Pay Attention to Their Frequency and Variety

If you are not getting asked about sleep issues in your patients, it must be your day off given how prevalent sleep issues seem to be nowadays. But is that just our impression regarding their prevalence or are they really as common as we suspect? Byars et al. (doi: 10.1542/peds.2011-0372) surveyed 359 mother/child pairs in a prospective birth cohort study using questionnaires given to mothers by trained interviewers when their children were 6, 12, 24, and 36 months of age. What follows in this article being early released this week is some great data regarding the most common sleep issues by age as parent-reported, including sleep issues that are less commonly noted by parents despite their potential seriousness (e.g. snoring). In addition, patients who have sleep problems in infancy are more likely to have sleep problems (although potentially different ones) as they become toddlers. This article will certainly wake you up to the need to make sleep issues a more prominent component of scheduled health maintenance visits if they aren’t already.