Though sleep occupies more than one third of our lives, sleep disorders did not gain full recognition, or extensive evaluation and treatment by medical practitioners until the early 1980s. Initiated by the intense investigation associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep in the early 1950s, and later with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, the explosion in the early 1970s of modern sleep medicine research remained largely focused on adults, with few clinicians specifically addressing pediatrics. Yet children are clearly quite different from adults in terms of sleep pattern, and advances in research and clinical practice in the last quarter of the 20th century finally spawned the subspeciality of pediatric sleep medicine.

Dr. Sheldon and his colleagues have assembled an invaluable guide for this relatively new field, offering discussions of sleep laboratory recording montages, monitoring and pneumography, pediatric sleep disorder management strategies, and normal and abnormal polysomnographic comparisons in infants and children.

Clinicians will now have at their disposal an impressive array of clinical data and observations to add to their diagnositic acumen for sleep-related disorders in children.