Investigation of Sleep Quality and Prevalence of Sleep-disordered Breathing in Children and Young People With Epilepsy

Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is a condition that affects around one in 20 children. In OSA, the muscles and soft tissues in the throat relax and collapse during sleep causing the upper airway to become blocked. Breathing is briefly interrupted, blood oxygen levels fall and this causes the child to wake and start breathing again. These episodes can happen many times a night causing severely disturbed sleep. Untreated OSA may leave children with daytime attention difficulties and problems with learning and behaviour. Epilepsy affects approximately 60,000 children in the UK and up to 30 per cent of these children have associated learning problems.

There is evidence, including pilot work undertaken by the study team to suggest that OSA is more common in children with epilepsy, in which case, sleep disturbance could account for some of the learning problems they experience. The aim of this study is to determine the prevalence of OSA in children with epilepsy.

The investigators plan to carry out detailed polysomnography sleep studies in 55 children with epilepsy and 28 healthy children (controls). These studies will measure the length and quality of sleep over one night spent at the hospital. Seizure activity during this period will be monitored by video recordings combined with electroencephalograms (EEG). Sleep-disordered will be assessed using a variety of tests to measure air-flow, lung expansion and blood oxygen levels. This study should help to determine if children with epilepsy are more likely to have OSA than healthy children of the same age. OSA is almost always treatable and the benefits of detecting and treating the condition in healthy children are well-established.

If OSA proves to be a common finding in children with epilepsy, it will be important to carry out further studies to see if treating the condition has beneficial effects on learning and behaviour. This project could lead doctors to target sleep-disordered breathing as a way of improving learning outcomes in children with epilepsy.

Children with epilepsy attending Royal Hospital for Children, Edinburgh will be invited to take part in the study. Children without epilepsy (controls) will also be recruited. The children without epilepsy are included because although there are statistics for incidence of OSA in the general population, information for all the measures of sleep the team will collect are not available.