Tonsillectomy and children?

[Seahunt]

If you have noticed any behavioral problems with your kids, actually this surgery might help! There was an interesting article about tonsillectomy and resulting better behavior in kids that have undergone it in the local paper recently - part of the article said:

But, they say, the growing body of evidence on this issue suggests that a significant number of children with inattention, hyperactivity, or sleepiness during the day - and also sleep-breathing problems at night - may benefit during both the night and day by tonsillectomy, an operation that was once performed on more than a million children a year but has become much less common in recent decades.

The procedure, also called adenotonsillectomy when both the tonsils and structures called adenoids are removed, is now performed on a few hundred thousand children a year. Nearly half of them have the surgery because enlarged tonsils and adenoids block the flow of air through their throat and impair their ability to breathe, and most of the rest because of repeated ear and throat infections. Almost all of the children who had surgery in the new study were thought by their surgeons to have symptoms of sleep apnea.

"These findings help support the idea that sleep-disordered breathing is actually helping to cause behavioral problems in children, and making them sleepy," says lead author Ronald Chervin, M.D., M.S., director of the U-M Sleep Disorders Center and co-leader of the U-M Center for Sleep Science. "This is one of the first studies to document, using gold-standard measures, that all of these sleep and behavior problems tend to resolve one year after enlarged tonsils and adenoids are removed."

 

[chobie]

If you have noticed any behavioral problems with your kids, actually this surgery might help! There was an interesting article about tonsillectomy and resulting better behavior in kids that have undergone it in the local paper recently - part of the article said:

But, they say, the growing body of evidence on this issue suggests that a significant number of children with inattention, hyperactivity, or sleepiness during the day - and also sleep-breathing problems at night - may benefit during both the night and day by tonsillectomy, an operation that was once performed on more than a million children a year but has become much less common in recent decades.

The procedure, also called adenotonsillectomy when both the tonsils and structures called adenoids are removed, is now performed on a few hundred thousand children a year. Nearly half of them have the surgery because enlarged tonsils and adenoids block the flow of air through their throat and impair their ability to breathe, and most of the rest because of repeated ear and throat infections. Almost all of the children who had surgery in the new study were thought by their surgeons to have symptoms of sleep apnea.

"These findings help support the idea that sleep-disordered breathing is actually helping to cause behavioral problems in children, and making them sleepy," says lead author Ronald Chervin, M.D., M.S., director of the U-M Sleep Disorders Center and co-leader of the U-M Center for Sleep Science. "This is one of the first studies to document, using gold-standard measures, that all of these sleep and behavior problems tend to resolve one year after enlarged tonsils and adenoids are removed."

Actaully, this is why we had him evaulated for the tonsilectomy. Because he has had so much strep throat he was recommended for the surgery, but this is what prompted us to find out. He has never slept well, wakes up several times a night and sleep walks and never seems rested in the mornings. And his teacher think he has ADD.