Sleep Quality and Quality of Life in School-Aged Children with Atopic Dermatitis

Monday, 7 July 2008
Pi-Chen Chang, PhD , College of Nursing, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan
Yueh-Hsia Liao, MS , Infection control, Cathay General Hospital Sijhih, Sijhih City, Taipei County, Taiwan

Learning Objective 1: the prevelance of sleep problems among school-aged children with atopic dermatitis.

Learning Objective 2: understand the correlation between sleep quality and the quality of life in school-aged children with atopic dermatitis.

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic skin disease that affects children's quality of sleep and health-related quality of life. This study is aimed to investigate the relationships of sleep quality and health-related quality of life among AD school-aged children.

The design of the research is case control. A purposive sampling was used to recruit 48 school-aged children with atopic dermatitis and 48 age and gender matched children. Actigraphy and sleeping diary were used to obtain sleep data for three continuous days. Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire (CSHQ), and Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ) were used to assess children's sleep behavior and health-relatedquality of life. The results of this study were as below: (1) AD children's sleep time and sleep efficiency were significantly lower than healthy children. Moreover, AD children's waking minutes, waking episodes, and sleep disturbance were significantly higher than healthy children. (2) The scores of CHQ-PF50- ‘physical function, bodily pain/discomfort, parental impact-time and emotional, and psychosocial summary' of health-related quality of life for children with AD were significantly lower than healthy children. The scores of CHQ-CF87-‘bodily pain/discomfort, behavior, and mental health' of health-related quality of life for children with AD were significantly lower than healthy children. (3) Wake minutes and CSHQ total score explained 37.2% of the variances of CHQ-PF50-‘psychosocial summary score' in children with AD . CSHQ total score explained 9% of the variances in CHQ-PF50-‘parental impact-time'. CSHQ total score explained 16.5% of the variances of CHQ-PF50-‘parental impact-emotional' in children with AD . Sleep latency, wake minutes and CSHQ total score explained 34.6% of the variances of CHQ-PF50-‘family activity score' in children with AD .

Understanding the correlation between sleep quality and the quality of life in school-aged children with atopic dermatitis may help health professionals in promoting the sleep quality of school-aged children with atopic dermatitis.