221 - Are Sleep Habits Correlated to Pediatric Dental Trauma?

Hodges W. Kerins C. (Texas A&M University College of Dentistry and Children’s Medical Center, Dallas, Texas)

Purpose: To determine if there is a positive correlation between children who exhibit poor sleep hygiene and an increased rate of dental trauma.

Methods: A prospective study conducted at the Children’s Hospital Emergency Department. Two questions were added to the On-Call Pediatric Dentist’s questionnaire for parents when they would go into the CMC ED to treat dental trauma pages. The two questions are:

1) What times does your child typically go to bed?
2) How many hours of sleep does your child typically get every night?

The kids will be broken into groups based on age, and based on the answers to these questions, they will be categorized into one of two groups (Good Sleep Hygiene/Bad Sleep Hygiene). The CDC recommendations for sleep will be used to separate the groups, and then correlation analysis will be run to determine if poor sleep hygiene increases the rate of dental trauma seen in pediatric patients.

Results: There were 43 patients who met inclusion criteria and consented to participate in this study. Of the 43 participants in this study, 29 were not receiving the recommended amount of average sleep per night. Also, 27
of the 43 participants were not going to bed within the recommended time frame for their age group. Both of these are over 50%, indicating that the majority of participants are receiving inadequate sleep hygiene.

Conclusions: There is a slight correlation between sleep hygiene and emergency dental visits. Because of this, it is important that pediatric dentist educate the patient and parents about proper sleep recommendations in hopes to cut down on the number of traumatic dental visits. Further research needs to be conducted as this was a small sample size and may not beindicative of the population.