Methods in pediatric sleep research and sleep medicine.

Several methods are used to evaluate sleep in infants, children, and adolescents including: Questionnaires and diaries, actigraphy, polysomnography, and electroencephalography which are well established. Novel approaches such as high-density electroencephalography, simultaneous electroencephalography-functional magnetic resonance imaging and nonpharmacological methods aiming for a modulation of sleep are currently only used for research. These approaches might become valuable methods for clinical application in the future. The purpose of this review is to present an overview of current methods and their respective fields of application and to report available rules and recommendations for their use.