Pulse transit time respiratory swing as a diagnostic test for obstructive sleep apnoea in children-An observational...

Pulse transit time (PTT) has been identified as a potentially useful tool for diagnosing obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) due to its high sensitivity in detecting cortical arousals. However, its use in clinical practise has been disappointing as it appears to lack the ability to distinguish between individuals with or without OSA. The majority of studies evaluating PTT for sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) have assessed the pulse transit time arousal index (PTT-AI), and there are limited published data on PTT respiratory swing (PTTrs). We previously conducted an observational study of PTT in 368 children with SDB. Our findings indicated that depending on the cut-off used, PTTrs identified OSA with low-to-moderate sensitivity and moderate-to-high specificity, using limited multi-channel sleep studies (MCSS) as the comparator.

We conducted this cross-sectional observational study in another cohort of 1,031 children with SDB who attended a secondary care centre consecutively for MCSS between July 2022 and November 2024. Polysomnography (PSG) is not available in UK secondary care centres, and our use of MCSS in this setting is novel. We analysed the data of 629 children using multinomial regression and machine learning.

We found a stepwise increase in PTTrs with increasing severity of SDB. Children with mild OSA had a mean PTTrs of 20.7 ms. Machine learning analysis indicated that the oxygen desaturation index (ODI3) and PTTrs were the most important predictors of SDB amongst the 15 variables studied.

Our findings suggest that PTTrs could complement oximetry to improve the detection of OSA in children. A validation study comparing PTTrs with PSG is needed.