Children with atopic dermatitis (AD) have worse sleep quality, according to a study published online in JAMA Pediatrics.
Faustine D. Ramirez, from the University of California in San Francisco, and colleagues conducted a longitudinal cohort study involving 13,988 children alive at 1 year and followed up with repeated measures of self-reported AD and sleep through age 16 years.
The researchers found that 35.3 percent of children met the definition of having atopic dermatitis between ages 2 and 16 years. At all ages, children with active AD and without AD had similar total sleep duration; for children with AD, the average estimated difference across childhood was a clinically negligible difference of two minutes less per day. At all time points, children with active AD were more likely to report worse sleep quality, with increased odds of experiencing more sleep-quality disturbances (adjusted odds ratio, 1.48). Worse sleep quality was seen for children with more severe active disease and with comorbid asthma or allergic rhinitis (adjusted odds ratios, 1.68 and 1.79, respectively). The odds of impaired sleep quality were also significantly increased for children with mild AD or inactive AD (odds ratio, 1.40 and 1.41, respectively).
“Clinical outcome measures for atopic dermatitis should explicitly address sleep quality, and additional work should investigate interventions to improve sleep quality and examine the association between atopic dermatitis treatment and children’s sleep,” the authors write.
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