Snoring :: Exercise & workouts improve sleep & snoring in obese, overweight kids

A new study has shown that exercise can reduce sleep-disordered breathing in children, which appeared in the November issue of Obesity. Exercise can reduce snoring among overweight children, even if it doesn’t result in weight loss.

Snoring is associated with poor sleep quality, which can lead to learning and behavioral problems that are often mistaken for disorders such as ADHD, and there is growing evidence that sleep disorders can contribute to a greater risk of being overweight.

To investigate whether exercise might reduce sleep-disordered breathing among overweight kids, Dr. Catherine Davis, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta and her team randomly assigned 100 overweight children between 7 and 11 years old to 13 weeks of “high-dose” exercise (40 minutes every school day), “low-dose” exercise (20 minutes), or to a control group that did not perform any additional exercise.

By the close of the program, half of the children who snored and were assigned to one of the exercise groups had stopped snoring. Greater improvements were seen among the high-dose exercisers. However, weight, fatigue and behavior did not change.

Workouts helped reduce the fat surrounding the neck area that can lead to collapse of the airway during sleep, while exercise may also have had metabolic or neurological effects that made the brain, nerves and muscles better able to maintain an open airway.


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