Clinical validation of a mandibular movement signal based system for the diagnosis of pediatric sleep apnea

Clinical validation of a mandibular movement signal based system for the diagnosis of pediatric sleep apnea

 

In February 2021, a scientific paper has been published in Pediatric Pulmonology to show the relevance of using the mandibular movements signal, measured by the Sunrise system, to diagnose pediatric OSA.

By Julianne Thimoléon

Context

This study was conducted by JB. Martinot, V. Cuthbert, N. Le-Dong, N. Coumans, D. De Marneffe, C. Letesson, JL. Pépin and D. Gozal.

Children are not immune Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). Indeed, searchers says OSA is a highly prevalent condition in children (1% - 5%) and is associated with severity‐dependent increases in the risk for adverse outcomes, namely neurocognitive and behavioral deficits, and cardiovascular and metabolic morbidities.

Given this prevalence, there is a consensus among experts on the need for simpler and automated diagnostic approaches.

In this extend, the goal was to evaluate the accuracy of Sunrise to estimate respiratory efforts by monitoring sleep mandibular movements (MM) for the diagnosis of OSA.

Study Design

The monocentric prospective study was conducted on 140 children, from 3 to 17, suffering from snoring and at least one of the OSA symptoms. The children were enrolled between September 2017 and November 2019 at CHU UCL - Namur (Belgium). They did an overnight in-laboratory sleep test with both polysomnography (PSG) and Sunrise equipments. The reference method PSG was manually scored and blindly compared with simultaneous MM recordings using the Sunrise system.

Results

Being exhaustive in a blogpost is difficult. To find all the results and the whole article, please visit this page.

By analysing the Data, searchers showed the huge agreement between the different measures. The higher the severity group, the higher this agreement is close, as we can see on the picture below.

Clinical validation of a mandibular movement signal based system for the diagnosis of pediatric sleep apnea

On this schema (upper line), is showed the relationship between Respiratory Disturbance Index (RDI) measured by the Sunrise device and the one measured by PSG. The data are classified into 3 clinical groups.

On the lower line, RDI from Sunrise device is compared with Obstructive Apnea/Hypopnea Index (OAHI), also classified into 3 clinical groups. The aim is to show these measures concordance and the accuracy of the mandibular movements signal.

These results are very helpful to assert the reliability of mandibular movements exploitation for OSA pediatric diagnosis.

Conclusion

MM automated analysis shows significant promise to diagnose moderate‐to‐severe pediatric OSA.

A few words about the Journal

Pediatric Pulmonology is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering pediatric pulmonology. It was established in 1985.

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