How Effective is Cpap in Terms of Treating Sleep Apnea in Children?
Sleep apnea is an increasingly common sleep disorder which currently affects some 18,000,000 people in the US alone. This figure is roughly 6.62% of the population and does not take into account an additional 2% to 4% of the population who are thought to be suffering from sleep apnea but who have yet to be diagnosed.
However, what many people do not realize is that there are also a surprisingly large and rising number of children who suffer from sleep apnea, with estimates revealing that roughly 2% of all children suffer from obstructive sleep apnea.
When it comes to children sleep apnea merits particularly close attention as at this crucial stage of growth and development apnea can cause memory, IQ and learning difficulties.
In a lot of cases obstructive sleep apnea arises to a large degree from overweight and the first line of attack in treating the problem is thus to shed a bit of weight. But, this is not always as easy as it sounds and frequently fails to ease the problem sufficiently.
For a lot of children the next stage is the use of an oral appliance while sleeping. These oral appliances must be custom made for the child and fitted by an orthodontist and are intended to hold the lower jaw in a position which ensures that the throat remains open while the child sleeps. Again improvement is not always satisfactory with an oral appliance and a lot of children are far from happy wearing them.
The best option when it comes to treating obstructive sleep apnea is the continuous positive airway machine which provides a steady stream of air by way of a mask which the child wears during sleep sleeping and which maintains an open airway.
CPAP machines have proved to be very successful but, as with most treatments, they will only produce sound results when they are used properly and here we come up against a particular problem with children.
In a recent study a number of children having CPAP treatment were followed for six months to see just how closely they followed the advice given for using their CPAP machines. The children were subjected to sleep studies at both the beginning and end of the study period and both they and their parents were questioned by the researchers about their use of the machines. In addition, the machines that were used in the study were all fitted with meters which recorded the use of the machines.
The study found that more than three quarters of the children did not make use of their machines as intended every night and that even those children who used the machines consistently were using them for only about 5 hours a night which was not sufficient to gain the maximum benefit from their use. Possibly most importantly, taking into consideration the fact that many of the children in the study were very young and thus required parental supervision to ensure the correct use of their machines, the study showed that the overwhelming majority of parents overestimated their child’s use of the system by in the region of two hours each night.
At this point, although it is clear that many children are not enjoying the maximum benefit of CPAP treatment, it remains unclear just why they are not using the system properly and further studies are underway to see just what improvements are possible for treating obstructive sleep apnea in children.
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