Hear Our Voices - Sleep Patterns and Autism

Hear Our Voices - Sleep Patterns and Autism

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  Home About Us *WISH LIST* Mission & History Mailing List Contact Us Sleep Patterns and Autism Search Successes Posted on March 22, 2011 by skhov Video Recent Posts Therapies Parents and caretakers of children with autism and Ribbon cutting ceremony for the Daily Living Skills Center and Sponsor a Child their doctors will attest to being familiar with sleep Snoezelen Room at SKHOV Forum disturbances. A few of the many sleep disturbances Benefits of Having a SEIT in the Donate Classroom reported are fragmented sleep patterns, difficulty Sleep Patterns and Autism falling asleep, frequent arousals, and periods of Early Intervention (EI) Program: Giving Toddlers a Strong Start Center-based Programs excessive sleep, alternating with periods of very little A Genetic Connection: Autistic Home-based Programs sleep. Lack of good quality sleep can result in Children and Their Younger Training Siblings daytime sleepiness that may hinder a child’s Workshops educational and behavioral programs, as well as bring Recent Comments added stress to the sleep-deprived family.(1) Archives Applied Behavior April 2011 Analysis A study published in the Journal of Autism and March 2011 What is Autism? Development Disorder aims to shed more Autism in the News Categories SKHOV News understanding on the sleep patterns of children with Autism Press Early Intervention autism ages 4-12.(2) Sleep studies conducted on Kolainu Magazine SKHOV News children with autism are commonly done using Special Education informal observation and questionnaires. Although Meta widely used, the results of these studies are Log in Books and Articles considered subjective because they rely on data Entries RSS Links Comments RSS Schools collected by observers with varied levels of experience WordPress.org Conferences and skills. Social Media The study compared sleep patterns of children with Send Us Feedback autism with those of normally developing children of the same age group. The data was collected from two sources; sleep assessment questionnaires and data obtained from an actigraph unit, a device which records body motion of the sleeping child in order to analyze their sleep patterns. The results collected by the actigraph unit were thought to be more accurate and objective because they weren’t based on the variable skills and experience of an observer. The outcome of this study is enlightening. The questionnaires revealed that autistic children had earlier morning wake-up times, along with multiple and early night wake-ups. The actigraph results showed that besides the early morning wake up times, sleep patterns of children with autism were similar to those of their normally developing counterparts. It’s easy to understand why parents are concerned
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  about the qualitytheir child’s sleep, but this study suggests that it may be possible that parents of children with autism are overly sensitive to their child’s sleep disturbances when really their night time activity is not all that different from those of other children. [1] Honomichl RD, Goodlin-Jones BL, Burnham M, Gaylor E, Anders TF. “Sleep Patterns of Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders.” Journal of Autism and Development Disorders. 2002 Dec:32(6):553-61. PMID: 12553592 (PubMed – Indexed for Medline) 2 Hering E, Epstein R, Elroy S, Iancu DR, Zelnik N. “Sleep Patterns in Autistic Children.” Journal of Autism and Development Disorders. 1999 Apr:29(2):143-7. PMID: 10382134 (PubMed – indexed for Medline)