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Characterization of Cardiopulmonary Coupling in Pediatric Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Abstract:

This study aims to investigate the use of cardiopulmonary coupling (CPC), as biomarker for characterizing obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) severity in children. CPC analysis is based on the time-frequency coherence (TFC) between the respiratory effort signal and heart rate variability. We analyzed 255 children with no, mild, moderate, and severe OSA during wake, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Results showed that the TFC in the low-frequency (LF) band increased significantly with the severity of OSA in both NREM (p<0.001) and REM sleep (p<0.001). Conversely, the TFC in the HF band, the parameter estimating CPC, is significantly lower for increasing OSA severity categories during NREM (p=0.02) and REM (p=0.03). The findings suggest that TFC could be a useful biomarker for assessing OSA severity in children, and could provide additional information about underlying pathological mechanisms.