NIH awards $2.9 million to Einstein for childhood sleep research

The Albert Einstein College of Medicine has been awarded a $2.9 million grant to help preschool children in Head Start programs develop healthier sleeping habits by providing parents and children with sleep health education, according to a press release.

Head Start is an early childhood program designed to help disadvantaged preschool-aged children and their families in ‘school readiness’, according to the program’s website.

Karen Bonuck

“Insufficient and/or poor quality sleep impairs young children’s development — socially, emotionally, cognitively and physically. Sleep problems that peak during the preschool years include short sleep duration, behavioral sleep problems such as getting to sleep or staying asleep, and sleep-related breathing problems such as snoring or apnea. They all affect the developing brain and may thus impair school readiness — a main goal of Head Start and other early childhood programs,” Karen Bonuck, PhD, professor of family and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, said in a press release.

The study’s initial phase will include the designing and introduction of interventions across seven Head Start agencies in New York. Next, 540 pairs of parents and children will be enrolled into a randomized controlled trial, where Bonuck and colleagues will evaluate how the interventions affect the children’s sleep duration and difficulties, behaviors and parental knowledge. The third phase will assess the practicality of screening children for sleep problems and then referring them for treatment, according to the release.

The grant will allow Bonuck to build on her previous program, the Early Childhood Sleep Education Program, which resulted in 30 more minutes of sleep per night among participating children, compared with the control group. Print and video materials, along with family visits, will be added to the program in Bonuck’s latest study,

According to Bonuck, the trial has a 5-year plan to develop ways to integrate sleep health literacy into both the state and federal level early-childhood education policies.

“Augmenting early-childhood programs with useful information about sleep could improve the lives and development of upwards of four million children,” Bonuck said in the release.