Esophageal pressures, polysomnography, and neurobehavioral outcomes of adenotonsillectomy in children.

Background: Esophageal pressure monitoring during polysomnography in children offers a gold-standard, “preferred” assessment for work of breathing, but is not commonly used in part because prospective data on incremental clinical utility are scarce. We compared a standard pediatric apnea/hypopnea index to quantitative esophageal pressures as predictors of apnea-related neurobehavioral morbidity and treatment response.

Methods: Eighty-one children aged 7.

Sleep stage dynamics differ between children with and without obstructive sleep apnea.

Study Objectives: Analysis of sleep dynamics--distributions of contiguous sleep and sleep stage durations--reveal exponential distributions and potential clinical utility in adults. We sought to examine these polysomnographic variables for the first time in children, and in the context of childhood sleep disordered breathing (SDB).

Design And Setting: Analysis of polysomnographic data available from the Washtenaw County Adenotonsillectomy Cohort.