Funding outcome

Obstructive sleep apnea is a common breathing problem that happens during sleep in 1-5%of children. It disrupts sleep as well as oxygen levels resulting in difficulties thinking, concentrating, and staying awake during the day as well as increasing the risk for high blood pressure and diabetes even in children. Despite all we have learned about obstructive sleep apnea in children, we still have a lot of difficulty making this diagnosis and deciding on the best treatment options for individual children. Over the last 10 years, we have learned that there are different types of obstructive sleep apnea in adults and that understanding these types helps to provide more accurate diagnoses and better treatment decisions for individual adults with obstructive sleep apnea. Our goal for this project is to identify different types of obstructive sleep apnea in children and understand how these different types of obstructive sleep apnea respond to specific treatments. We will look at information previously collected as part of routine medical care from 1200 children undergoing sleep studies as well as information from their medical and health system records. We will use this use special ways of analyzing the data, include types of artifical intelligence, to determine types of obstructive sleep apnea based on symptoms, sleep study results, and response to treatment. The results from this study will show us different types of obstructive sleep apnea in children, and how these types of obstructive sleep apnea respond to treatments. We will find out what features help us decide which children have each type of obstructive sleep apnea and what features tell us who will benefit most from different treatments. Our next step will be to use this information about the types of obstructive sleep apnea in children to understand how to design new, simple, and home based tests to find obstructive sleep apnea and to choose the best treatment for individual children with obstructive sleep apnea.