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(UK)'Sleep problems in children' - Crawleys fatigue syndrome?

Messages
2,125
Just heard about a report that's just come out about mounting problems with children sleeping.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39140836

"
Ten times more prescriptions of common sleep medication melatonin have also been written for children and adults under 55 over the same period.
Poor sleep in children has been linked to a greater risk of obesity, lower immunity, and mental health issues."
"
"Ellie goes to bed a 21:00, but usually lies awake until at least 02:30.
"Sometimes I'll go to school and I'll have had only two and a half hours' sleep," she says.
Sleep deprivation has affected her education. She is often off sick due to exhaustion and viral infections.
"If you sneeze in her room, Ellie will catch the flu," says her mother, Joanne.
"Overnight investigation showed no medical explanation for Ellie's sleep problem."
"
The staff suspect she may just need a better sleep routine: she has a smartphone, two tablets and a television in her bedroom, and uses them just before bed.

Staying off her devices an hour before bedtime might help both her sleep and her weight loss.

The Children's Sleep Charity has found 92% of the families using their specialist clinics had solved their child's sleep problems within six months by changing their bedtime routine."

Although they are using it as a link to obesity, you can't help but wonder about ECs claims about CFS in children being 'really common'.
 
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Snowdrop

Rebel without a biscuit
Messages
2,933
Finding the cause of this sleep disruption is one of several things that may relate to ME that need to be sorted out in a much more thorough way than they have previously been. The problem with research so far IMO is that it has been poorly and inadequately done drawing premature conclusions that seem to fit and then no one looks further or deeper into what is really going on. It's the same for thyroid issues from what I can gather from reading here.

More biological research into hormones would help ever so many people.
 

me/cfs 27931

Guest
Messages
1,294
Sounds like my experience in the first year after ME/CFS onset. 3-4 hours of sleep a night, constant upper respiratory infections, stumbling as I tried to walk between classes at school, lost 30 pounds to where I looked like skeleton. I was so sick and so sleep deprived, for an entire year my first thought upon waking every single morning was "I wish I was dead".

The only thing that helped was when I was taken out of school for a couple months and allowed time to rest. None of the antidepressants I was given seemed to help at all.

I wonder how common my experience was. Because if it's a common experience, I suspect most simply don't make it to tell their story. It's just by a chance fluke that I didn't kill myself.
 
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ash0787

Senior Member
Messages
308
maybe the parenting is getting worse or the parents are becoming more disposed towards reporting it to the doctors etc, it doesn't necessarily mean anything or have anything to do with CFS. Just seems like another "won't somebody think of the children !" piece.

That said I did meet a young lad that has some sort of sleep problem and they wont give him melatonin,
maybe there is some sort of societal trend but who knows.
 

Hutan

Senior Member
Messages
1,099
Location
New Zealand
and they wont give him melatonin,
maybe there is some sort of societal trend but who knows.

Melatonin is given to domestic animals to control their reproductive cycles. There is a professor in South Australia who has spent a lot of time looking at melatonin in sheep etc for the agricultural industry.

He has come out very strongly saying that we should take the use of melatonin in humans seriously and should certainly not be giving it to children and adolescents. I've posted on it here:

http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/high-dose-melatonin.38750/#post-619528

e.g.
Warning on use of drug for children's sleep
Wednesday, 25 February 2015


Sleep researchers at the University of Adelaide are warning doctors and parents not to provide the drug melatonin to children to help control their sleep problems.
...
In a paper published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, Professor David Kennaway, Head of the Circadian Physiology Laboratory at the University of Adelaide's Robinson Research Institute, warns that providing melatonin supplements to children may result in serious side effects when the children are older.
...
"Melatonin is registered in Australia as a treatment for primary insomnia only for people aged 55 years and over, but it's easily prescribed as an 'off label' treatment for sleep disorders for children."
...
Professor Kennaway says there is extensive evidence from laboratory studies that melatonin causes changes in multiple physiological systems, including cardiovascular, immune and metabolic systems, as well as reproduction in animals.
...
Professor Kennaway, who has been researching melatonin for the past 40 years, says these concerns have largely been ignored throughout the world.
...
"Considering the small advances melatonin provides to the timing of sleep, and considering what we know about how melatonin works in the body, it is not worth the risk to child and adolescent safety," he says.

I think it's worth giving some weight to this professor's opinion. He probably knows as much about how melatonin works as anyone and, as far as I can see, he has no ulterior motive for expressing these concerns.
 
Messages
3,263
"Ellie goes to bed a 21:00, but usually lies awake until at least 02:30.
Staying off her devices an hour before bedtime might help both her sleep and her weight loss.
This just doesn't add up. It takes her five and a half hours to get to sleep, but she is going to eliminate that wait time entirely by abstaining from phone/device use for only one hour before bed?

As far as I can see, "sleep hygiene" has a lot in common with CBT for CFS: its a platitude that appears to make the problem go away for the practitioner. And the patient probably doesn't complain of problems after this because they just assume they can't be doing it right.