July American 8.fra.0065 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Parents often report that it takes two to four years for children with Fragile X syndrome to begin sleeping through the night. Typically developing children usually adopt normal sleep patterns by the time they are six to eight months old.

Many neurological disorders are accompanied by sleep difficulties, says Yung-Hui Fu of the University of California, San Francisco, but the reason for those sleeping problems is often unknown.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

An international team of scientists led by David Nelson, a human geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, set out to investigate why. The study appears in the July American Journal of Human Genetics and is the first to suggest a mechanism for the sleep disruptions that accompany Fragile X syndrome.