Sleep apnea reduces the amount of computational deep sleep in the right frontopolar area in school-aged children.

OBJECTIVE: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) causes different symptoms in children, even though polysomnographic parameters that assess sleep quality may remain normal. Our spectral analysis of NREM sleep revealed local deep sleep reductions in adult OSA patients. We hypothesize that our method would also reveal local changes in pediatric OSA patients.

METHODS: Polysomnographies were part of a larger study evaluating snoring in school-aged children. All right-handed children with OSA with matched peers (n=10+10) were included. The median sleep depth (in Hz) and the amount of deep sleep <4Hz (DS%) were extracted for the whole NREM sleep time and for the first four NREM sleep episodes from frontopolar, central and occipital EEG-channels.

RESULTS: The main findings were that NREM sleep was lighter and DS% decreased in the right frontopolar area (p-values 0.034 and 0.019) in the OSA group when compared with the control group.

CONCLUSION: Local sleep quality changes might provide new insights to evaluate the effects of pediatric OSA as our method revealed a local computational deep sleep decrease in the right frontopolar area in the OSA group.

SIGNIFICANCE: The presented findings might implicate delayed local cortical development in children's OSA, which may account for the cognitive problems found in pediatric OSA.