Bullies May Have Sleep Disorder
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SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 6/20/2007
The next time you see a student bullying another kid, you may want to consider this: aggressive behavior by school children is likely to have multiple causes, one of which may be an undiagnosed sleep-related breathing disorder, according to recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan.
The study, presented at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, and conducted by Louise M. O'Brien, a Ph.D researcher at the university, focused on children in the second through fifth grades who attended school in an urban public school district.
Researchers surveyed parents and teachers and found that kids who bully were more than twice as likely to have a condition called sleep-related breathing disorder (SRBD), which affects more than 10 percent of children. Its most common symptom is snoring, but it can produce conditions as serious as obstructive sleep apnea, in which a person temporarily stops breathing. This occurs in one to two percent of children.
"Treatment of an SRBD has been shown to improve other behaviors in children," O’Brien says. "Therefore, it is possible that treatment could reduce such behaviors and provide a novel way to target bullying and aggressive behaviors in the school setting."
