Evaluating Excessive and Chronic Sleepiness in Teenagers

I’m sure you remember those days of sleeping 16 hours straight on the weekends and not quite waking up until third or fourth period during the week. If your teen years were anything like mine, your sleep patterns didn’t match up with your required daily schedule. Now, researchers have developed a new tool to measure daytime sleepiness in adolescents, the Cleveland Adolescent Sleepiness Questionnaire (CASQ).

“Administering the CASQ to groups of adolescents with other known sleep disorders would provide additional information about clinically significant score cut-off points. Having a brief, valid and inexpensive measure of daytime sleepiness at their disposal would enable clinicians to avoid the more costly and burdensome multiple sleep latency test. Such an instrument could also be used as a simple, inexpensive way to monitor patient responses to treatment for sleep problems or disorders,” [said James C. Spilsbury, PhD, of the Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics in Cleveland, Ohio].*

The tool’s immediate value seems to be the ability to assess and diagnose sleep disorders among teens.

Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King