Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Question 1 What is the impact of computer games on sleep in children?
  1. Diluki Kevitiyagala1,
  2. Fiona Finlay1,
  3. Anna Baverstock2
  1. 1Community Child Health, Bath and North East Somerset PCT, Bath, UK
  2. 2General Paediatrics, Taunton and Somerset Hospital, Taunton, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Diluki Kevitiyagala, Community Child Health, Bath and North East Somerset PCT, NHS House, Newbridge Hill, Bath BA1 3QE, UK; diluki{at}msn.com

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Scenario

You are a community paediatric registrar carrying out an outreach community clinic. You see a 12-year-old child who has difficulty settling down to sleep. You give his mother the usual sleep hygiene advice and discuss the importance of a good routine including having a period of ‘quiet time before lights out’. He currently plays computer games in his room before turning off the light. As part of your discussion you suggest that he stops playing computer games before bed. His mother, who is a staff nurse, asks what evidence there is to support this advice. You decide to examine the evidence.

Structured clinical question

In a child of any age [subject], does computer game playing before bed [intervention] adversely affect sleep [outcome]?

Search strategy and outcome

Primary sources

PubMed was searched using the terms ‘children’ [MeSH] AND ‘sleep’ [MeSH] AND ‘computer games’ [MeSH]. Twelve articles were found of which all the abstracts were read. Only two articles were …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Competing interests None.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

Linked Articles