2024 · Clinical practice in pediatric psychology · paywalled
Sleep Patterns, Pain, and Emotional Functioning in Youth with Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Szabo et al.
The finding, in our words
In 25 youths with inflammatory bowel disease, actigraphy showed that longer sleep onset latency was associated with next-day pain, while pain was linked to better subsequent night sleep efficiency. The study suggests actigraphy may be a useful objective tool for screening sleep disturbances in pediatric medical clinics, though further work is needed on feasibility.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Continuous wearable tracking with the Empatica EmbracePlus smartwatch and digital surveys proved feasible in patients with Li-Fraumeni syndrome, showing higher compliance in adults compared to children and identifying physiological stress patterns linked to cancer surveillance events.
Nagaraj et al., JMIR formative research · source ↗
High-school students show substantial circadian phase shifts from school week to weekend, creating social jetlag that is most marked in those with later phases who also exhibit the greatest weekend catch-up sleep. Self-reported proxies such as questionnaires and actigraphy-based midsleep correlate poorly with biological circadian phase measured by salivary melatonin, underscoring the need for direct biomarker assessment in decentralised sleep diagnostics.
In a six-week trial of 53 children with ADHD, kefir supplementation did not significantly improve ADHD symptoms overall but was associated with modest improvements in actigraphy-measured sleep quality, specifically fewer minutes awake during the night. However, children self-reported more sleep problems after the intervention. Stool microbiome analysis revealed increased abundance of several bifidobacterium species, demonstrating how decentralised microsampling and wearable monitoring can generate clinical evidence in paediatric neurodevelopmental disorders.
In a 14-day study of youth with neurodevelopmental conditions and chronic pain, multimodal in-home monitoring achieved good accelerometer wear compliance (77% wore devices for at least 7 days) and moderate survey engagement, but adherence to salivary cortisol sampling was low at 28% after excluding protocol violations and dry swabs. Families reported high overall satisfaction and willingness to participate again, highlighting that remote sampling protocols in pediatric populations require iterative tailoring to improve biospecimen collection adherence.
Boerner et al., Journal of developmental and behavioral pediatrics : JDBP · source ↗
In a Brazilian birth cohort, longer sleep duration and higher sleep efficiency at age 11 were associated with higher gut microbial alpha-diversity and lower Bacteroidetes abundance at age 12, suggesting sleep influences gut microbiota composition in adolescence.
Carpena et al., Sleep medicine (paywalled) · source ↗