BackgroundThe current study aimed to examine the changes following a sleep hygiene intervention on sleep hygiene practices, sleep quality, and daytime symptoms in youth.MethodsParticipants aged 10–18 years with self-identified sleep problems completed our age-appropriate F.E.R.R.E.T (an acronym for the categories of Food, Emotions, Routine, Restrict, Environment and Timing) sleep hygiene programme; each category has three simple rules to encourage good sleep. Participants (and parents as appropriate) completed the Adolescent Sleep Hygiene Scale (ASHS), Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Sleep Disturbance Scale for Children (SDSC), Pediatric Daytime Sleepiness Scale (PDSS), and wore Actical® monitors twice before (1 and 2 weeks) and three times after (6, 12 and 20 weeks) the intervention. Anthropometric data were collected two weeks before and 20 weeks post-intervention.ResultsThirty-three youths (mean age 12.9 years; M/F = 0.8) enrolled, and retention was 100%. ASHS scores significantly improved (p = 0.005) from a baseline mean (SD) of 4.70 (0.41) to 4.95 (0.31) post-intervention, as did PSQI scores [7.47 (2.43) to 4.47 (2.37); p < 0.001] and SDSC scores [53.4 (9.0) to 39.2 (9.2); p < 0.001]. PDSS scores improved from a baseline of 16.5 (6.0) to 11.3 (6.0) post- intervention (p < 0.001). BMI z-scores with a baseline of 0.79 (1.18) decreased significantly (p = 0.001) post-intervention to 0.66 (1.19). Despite these improvements, sleep duration as estimated by Actical accelerometry did not change. There was however a significant decrease in daytime sedentary/light energy expenditure.ConclusionsOur findings suggest the F.E.R.R.E.T sleep hygiene education programme might be effective in improving sleep in children and adolescents. However because this was a before and after study and a pilot study with several limitations, the findings need to be addressed with caution, and would need to be replicated within a randomised controlled trial to prove efficacy.Trial registrationAustralian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12612000649819

At 3 months of age, infants provoked to arouse from sleep showed PTT changes that inversely mimicked BP trends, suggesting that PTT could be useful in infant studies as a marker for autonomic perturbations that occur during sleep in both clinical and research settings.

Results suggest that OSA may increase risk for some poorer educational and behavioural outcomes. The findings are reasonably consistent with and add to the evidence base of the few studies that have explored this relationship.

This paper aims to assess the efficacy and practical feasibility of implementing a ground source heat pump (GSHP) vis-à-vis an air source heat pump (ASHP) for domestic applications. The outcomes of this comparison are based on monitoring each of those systems installed in two near identical adjacent houses in Perth, Western Australia. The former house has an open-loop groundwater system. There is one family in each house whose operational requirements of the air conditioning system were independent. Data collected from both houses over 2 years was used to determine the cooling capacities delivered and coefficient of performance (COP), as a function of seasonal variations of ambient conditions. It was observed that the COP of the GSHP system was higher than that of the ASHP system for both heating and cooling. Further, these two performance parameters were independent of ambient conditions in the former whereas they show a perceivable ambient dependent trend in the latter.

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