Reliability of Home Respiratory Polygraphy for the Diagnosis of Sleep Apnea in Children

Abstract OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic reliability of home respiratory polygraphy (HRP) in children with a clinical suspicion of OSA-hypopnea syndrome (OSAS). METHODS: A prospective blind evaluation was performed. Children between the ages of 2 to 14 years with clinical suspicion of OSAS who were referred to the Sleep Unit were included. An initial HRP followed by a later date, same night, in-laboratory overnight respiratory polygraphy and polysomnography (PSG) in the sleep laboratory were performed. The apnea-hypopnea index (AHI)-HRP was compared with AHI-PSG, and therapeutic decisions based on AHI-HRP and AHI-PSG were analyzed using intraclass correlation coefficients, Bland-Altman plots, and receiver operator curves (ROCs). RESULTS: Twenty-seven boys and 23 girls, with a mean age of 5.3 ± 2.5 years, were studied, and 66% were diagnosed with OSAS based on a PSG-defined obstructive respiratory disturbance index ≥ 3/h total sleep time. Based on the availability of concurrent HRP-PSG recordings, the optimal AHI-HRP corresponding to the PSG-defined OSAS criterion was established as ≥ 5.6/h The latter exhibited a sensitivity of 90.9% (95% CI, 79.6%-100%) and a specificity of 94.1% (95% CI, 80%-100%). CONCLUSIONS: HRP recordings emerge as a potentially useful and reliable approach for the diagnosis of OSAS in children. However, more research is required for the diagnosis of mild OSAS using HRP in children.