Exercise can reduce snoring among overweight children, even if it doesn’t result in weight loss, a new study shows.

Snoring is associated with poor sleep quality, which can lead to learning and behavioral problems that are often mistaken for disorders such as ADHD, Dr. Catherine L. Davis of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta noted in an interview with Reuters Health.

Furthermore, prescribing stimulant ADHD drugs, like Ritalin, to kids who aren’t sleeping well will only make matters worse, she added. What’s more, while obesity is known to make snoring more likely, she added, there’s growing evidence that sleep disorders can contribute to a greater risk of being overweight.

To investigate whether exercise might reduce sleep-disordered breathing among overweight kids, Davis and her team randomly assigned 100 overweight children between 7 and 11 years old to 13 weeks of “high-dose” exercise (40 minutes every school day), “low-dose” exercise (20 minutes), or to a control group that did not perform any additional exercise.

The workouts consisted of games like basketball and tag, but unlike traditional PE classes, Davis noted, there was no standing around waiting to play or be picked - children were on the move for the entire session.

At the beginning of the study, parents of one quarter of the kids reported that their children had symptoms, such as snoring and inattention, serious enough to indicate a problem. Just 2 percent of all children are thought to have sleep-disordered breathing, Davis and her colleagues note in the current issue of the journal Obesity.

By the close of the program, half of the children who snored and were assigned to one of the exercise groups had stopped snoring. Greater improvements were seen among the high-dose exercisers. However, weight, fatigue and behavior did not change.

Exercise alone is generally not enough to help people lose weight, Davis noted, although it does help people become more fit. It’s possible that the workouts helped reduce the fat surrounding the neck area that can lead to collapse of the airway during sleep, she added, while exercise may also have had metabolic or neurological effects that made the brain, nerves and muscles better able to maintain an open airway.

To get the same amount of exercise in the real world, the children would probably need to exercise for an hour each day, Davis said. Parents may do well to send their kids out for some exercise right after school, she suggested - letting kids burn off pent up energy might make them better able to do their homework afterwards.

SOURCE: Obesity, November 2006.