How to Spot Sleep Apnea Symptoms in Children

Posted By EightNine On 24th April 2011

Over the last few years it has become pretty obvious that sleep apnea is far more common in children than most people realized. It is also being recognized that a lot of issues like an inability to pay attention may be the result of apnea. Therefore it is important to be able to recognize sleep apnea symptoms in children.

Spotting sleep apnea symptoms in children can be difficult, mainly because they are asleep when the problem occurs. The only way to really tell is to watch them while they sleep. If they are suffering from the condition they will likely wake up gasping on a fairly regular basis. This is when they have stopped breathing. In most cases the child will have no memory of this happening since it normally doesn’t wake them up completely. Since watching your kids sleep is not the most practical option you are going to want to look for other things that are more obvious.

The most obvious sleep apnea symptom in children is that they will snore. If they are suffering from the condition they will probably snore loudly and chronically. Unfortunately you can’t really base a diagnosis on snoring. There are lots of kids who snore and don’t have apnea and there are even a few who have apnea and don’t snore. Nevertheless if your child does snore on a regular basis it is a warning sign and you should be on the lookout for other sleep apnea symptoms to help confirm your suspicion.

The most likely thing that your child will notice if they have sleep apnea is that they feel tired all of the time. This is because they are constantly being awakened when they stop breathing. While this doesn’t wake them completely it does prevent them from getting proper REM sleep. Instead what happens is that they get more like a nap. There are a number of other sleep apnea symptoms in children that are related to not sleeping properly. These would include things like not being able to concentrate, having trouble with memory or being irritable. Usually these symptoms are attributed to other causes but given the prevalence of sleep apnea it would be a good idea to have your child checked for this.

There are lots of other sleep apnea symptoms in children that you can look for but a lot of them are hard to spot and are frequently thought to be caused by other things. The easiest of these to spot will be mouth breathing. Most children with apnea will breathe through their mouth when they are awake. Enlarged tonsils are another fairly easy to symptom to spot, at least for a doctor, most parents would have no idea if they were enlarged. One thing that you do have to keep in mind is that unlike adults it is not all that common for children with sleep apnea to be overweight so that is not something that you can use to diagnose the condition.

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