Sleep Disturbance as a Contributor to Pediatric Obesity: Implications and Screening

Obesity causes more than 200 medical disorders including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea. In particular, the prevalence and rate of obesity in children and adolescents have increased with over 1/3 of the US pediatric population afflicted with overweight and obesity. Though there is a multifactorial etiology including complex biological and physiological mechanisms involved in energy regulation that may predispose toward an obesity phenotype, we highlight an often missed and overlooked etiology of obesity in clinical assessment in children- sleep disturbance and its causation to weight gain.