An updated clinical practice guideline from the American Academy of Pediatrics spells out which children with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome who undergo adenotonsillectomy should be admitted as inpatients.
"That’s really important because the vast majority of children have adenotonsillectomy on an outpatient basis," said Dr. Carole L. Marcus, who chaired a subcommittee that assembled the guideline, which was updated from a 2002 version and published online Aug. 27 in Pediatrics.
Courtesy Dr. Carole L. Marcus
Dr. Carole L. Marcus
Another new component of the 10-page guideline, titled "Diagnosis and Management of Childhood Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome," includes an option for clinicians to prescribe intranasal steroids for a subset of children with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS).
"For children with mild obstructive sleep apnea – especially for those in whom surgery might be contraindicated, or in those who have already had surgery and have some residual obstructive apnea – intranasal steroids could be helpful," Dr. Marcus, who directs the Sleep Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an interview. "There are still a lot of unanswered questions [about this practice], one of the biggest being that all of the studies have been relatively short term, meaning weeks to months, not years. Does a child need just one course, or do they need to be on it for the rest of their lives? Those are studies that need to be done."
To update the 2002 guideline, Dr. Marcus and 11 other members of the interdisciplinary AAP Subcommittee on Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome reviewed 3,166 articles from the medical literature related to the diagnosis and management of OSAS in children and adolescents that were published during 1999-2008. Then subcommittee members "selectively updated this literature search for articles published from 2008 to 2011 specific to guideline categories." Of the 3,166 studies, 350 were used to formulate eight recommendations, termed "key action statements" (Pediatrics 2012;130:576-84).
Since publication of the previous guideline, "there has been a huge amount of research done in this field," noted Dr. Marcus, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. "Many of the initial studies we looked at for the first guideline were case series. Now people are doing well-structured studies and looking at some of the detailed outcomes such as neurocognitive findings."
The first recommendation in the updated guideline advises clinicians to screen for OSAS during routine health maintenance visits, "because OSA in children is underdiagnosed," Dr. Marcus explained. "Parents don’t necessarily think of snoring as a sign of a serious disease. They might think it’s funny, but it’s actually a sign of illness.
"Knowing how busy pediatricians are, there are two questions that are crucial," she continued. "One is, ‘How does your child sleep?’ The other is, ‘Does your child snore?’ If you get a positive [response] to the snoring [question] you do need to go into more detail. The next question would be, ‘Is there labored breathing with the snoring?’ Your history will tell you which children need further objective evaluation, such as a sleep study."
The guideline also recommends that the following subset of children be admitted as inpatients after tonsillectomy: those younger than age 3; those with severe OSAS on polysomnography; those with cardiac complications of OSAS; those with failure to thrive; those who are obese; and those with craniofacial anomalies, neuromuscular disorders, or a current respiratory infection.
Another component to the guideline is the recommendation that clinicians refer patients for continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) management if OSAS signs and symptoms persist after adenotonsillectomy or if adenotonsillectomy is not performed. Dr. Marcus described CPAP as "the best way to go as a second-line option. Since the previous guidelines came out, the prevalence of obesity in children has gone up even more dramatically. Therefore, there is a lot more OSA out there, and pediatricians will be seeing a lot more in children of all ages."
One component of the guideline related to polysomnography proved difficult for the committee members and the consulting medical societies to reach consensus on. This recommendation states that clinicians should obtain a polysomnogram or refer the patient to a sleep specialist or otolaryngologist if the child or adolescent snores regularly or meets the symptoms and signs of OSAS.
"If one agrees that sleep studies are the only objective way to tell what’s going on, we just don’t have the resources in this country to study every child," Dr. Marcus said. "The literature is very strong showing that a history and physical exam could give you an idea of which children you should have an index of suspicion about, but do not tell you which children have sleep apnea. The vast number of children who have adenotonsillectomy for suspected OSA are having it done without any sort of objective finding. The studies that have been done show that about 50% of the time, even with a history that seems indicative of OSA, the children will have normal sleep studies."