Family Matters: The Role of Internalized Stigma in Shaping Burden Across Caregivers and Patients with Major Depression.

Sleep is a fundamental component of child health and is essential for neurodevelopment, emotional regulation, cognitive performance, and immune functioning. Even modest sleep disruption may adversely affect daytime behavior, school functioning, family well-being, and overall quality of life. Sleep disorders are prevalent among children undergoing cancer treatment and survivors, but they are generally neglected in medical practice since the focus is usually on managing the disease and its side effects [,,,,,,,]. Sleep problems can be a risk for children suffering from hematologic malignancy. This is because factors such as frequent hospital admissions, long-term effects of treatment, monitoring at night, drugs, and worries associated with illnesses and treatment might cause sleeplessness. In the current setting, corticosteroids become especially significant as they form an important part of several protocols for leukemia and lymphomas and have the potential to affect sleep via their influence on circadian rhythms, hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis functioning and central nervous system arousal [,,,,,]. Even though there are many studies that have been carried out before on pediatric oncology, most of the literature that exists today focuses on the overall sleep burden among cancer patients rather than establishing sleep profiles specific to certain domains within hematological cancers. As a result, it remains unclear whether sleep disruption in children with leukemia and lymphoma is primarily characterized by shortened sleep duration, sleep fragmentation, anxiety-related disturbances, parasomnias, or a broader generalized pattern [,,,,,].