From
The New York Times:
Many theories are thrown around to explain the rise in the diagnosis and
treatment of A.D.H.D. in children and adults. According to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, 11 percent of school-age children
have now received a diagnosis of the condition. I don’t doubt that many
people do, in fact, have A.D.H.D.; I regularly diagnose and treat it in
adults. But what if a substantial proportion of cases are really sleep
disorders in disguise?
For some people — especially children — sleep deprivation does not
necessarily cause lethargy; instead they become hyperactive and
unfocused. Researchers and reporters are increasingly seeing connections
between dysfunctional sleep and what looks like A.D.H.D., but those
links are taking a long time to be understood by parents and doctors.
We all get less sleep than we used to. The number of adults who reported
sleeping fewer than seven hours each night went from some 2 percent in
1960 to more than 35 percent in 2011. Sleep is even more crucial for
children, who need delta sleep — the deep, rejuvenating, slow-wave kind —
for proper growth and development. Yet today’s youngsters sleep more
than an hour less than they did a hundred years ago. And for all ages,
contemporary daytime activities — marked by nonstop 14-hour schedules
and inescapable melatonin-inhibiting iDevices
— often impair sleep. It might just be a coincidence, but this
sleep-restricting lifestyle began getting more extreme in the 1990s, the
decade with the explosion in A.D.H.D. diagnoses.
A number of studies have shown that a huge proportion of children with
an A.D.H.D. diagnosis also have sleep-disordered breathing like apnea or
snoring, restless leg syndrome or non-restorative sleep, in which delta
sleep is frequently interrupted. (Read entire article.)
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