Habilitation of sleep problems among mothers and their children with autism spectrum disorder: Insights from multi-level exploratory dyadic analyses.
Wasmiah Bin Eid, Mengyu Lim, Giulio Gabrieli and 4 others
PMID 36211831WHAT IT FOUND
In 29 families, mothers and their autistic children both slept poorly.
Long time to fall asleep and short time in bed were linked to children's sleep duration; child sleep breathing problems were linked to mothers' fragmented sleep.
Key findings
01Mothers and children both slept poorly: mothers spent 79.6% of time in bed asleep, children spent 71.5%, and children took about 38 min longer to fall asleep than mothers.
02Mothers slept more when they spent more time in bed, fell asleep sooner, had less fragmented sleep, had older children, and their children spent more time in bed.
03Mothers' fragmented sleep was linked to their child's sleep breathing problems, and mothers' longer night wakings were linked to their child's longer night wakings.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
29 mother-child dyads is a small sample, especially after splitting children into 21 school-aged and 8 adolescents for some comparisons. The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that any variable caused another. There was no typically developing control group. Sleeping arrangements, such as whether mother and child slept in the same room, were not collected. One mother's cortisol data were removed, and cortisol values were compared only within the sample because normative data were unavailable. Mothers completed all questionnaires, so child sleep problem scores were parent-reported. The analyses were exploratory and included multiple regression and dyadic comparisons.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that improving maternal sleep will improve child sleep or ASD habilitation. This was an observational study of 29 families with no intervention, and causality cannot be determined.