Abstract:

Sleep plays an very important role in children´s growth and development, but insufficient sleep as well as sleep disorders turns to be common in modern society. This research project is the first series research in the field of sleep which was designed to address below questions. ①Chinese children´s sleep ever have “quality” and “quantity” problem? ②If those kinds of sleep problems affect children´s health? ③How these kinds of harm effect children’s health? ④How to prevent such hazards. This project was designed to carry out the systematic evaluation of children´s sleep and its related factors by multidisciplinary teams from epidemiology, pediatrics, neurobiology, and pedagogy. It was valued as filling the blank of national children sleep foundation information. In addition, it was further explored the effects and mechanism of sleep on children physical growth and nervous system development such as obesity and learning and memories. Finally, this study was translated into health policy to advocate the government postpone the school start time based on the results from well designed studies. From the perspective of sleep health, make policy recommendations and intervention programme on the current daily routine of primary and secondary schools. This policy was later proved to not only increase children´s sleep time but also improve their sleep quality. This was kind of translational research to use medical research results into health policy, eventually benefits children´s health. This research project obtained the National Scientific and Technological Progress Second Prize in 2011.

Key words: sleep, children, obesity, learning memory, application