[Home cardiorespiratory sleep study in children. Will it be feasible?]

Childhood obstructive sleep apnea syndrome is a common condition and can result in serious complications. The nocturnal polysomnography remains the gold standard in the diagnosis of this pathology. Given the scarcity of sleep laboratories, namely with paediatric profile, screening techniques have been commonly used. It was our aim to study the yield of the home cardiorespiratory sleep studies carried out in children. Since January of 1999 until June of 2003, 33 home cardiorespiratory sleep studies were performed in children. We studied 31 children (21 male) with a median age of 10.6+/-3.4 years. Five children had craniofacial malformations, 2 neuromuscular diseases and 10 were obese. The signals of nasal flow and saturation were good/acceptable in 67.7% and 96.8% of the cases, respectively. In 2 cases the register was null. Average of apnea-hypopnea index was of 10.7+/-12.3/hour, average saturation of 95.6%+/-3.0 %, minimum saturation of 82.2 %+/-9.2% and dessaturation index of 12.5+/-10.7/hour. Childhood obstructive sleep apnea syndrome was confirmed/suggested in 30 children. The apnea-hypopnea index and the dessaturation index were significantly higher in the group of children with craniofacial malformations and neuromuscular disorders comparatively to children with obesity (26.3 versus 10.5 and 21.5 versus 11.3, respectively) but without statistical significance. In our experience, home cardiorespiratory sleep studies is a diagnostic method easily used in children. This method gives more information comparatively to other screening techniques so that it can evaluate with more accuracy the existence of sleep disordered breathing and may be a possible alternative to polysomnography.