Cognitive weakness in children under 5 with sleep disordered breathing
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Does Sleep Disordered Breathing in Pre School Age Children cause cognitive weakness reversible by adenotonsillectomy? A feasibility study.
IRAS ID
178059
Contact name
Michael Tremlett
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
South Tees Hospitals NHS FT
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 6 months, 25 days
Research summary
Sleep disorder breathing (SDB) is a condition affecting 10% of children aged 2-6 years. It is a combination of snoring most nights during sleep, broken sleep, short periods of stopping breathing (apnoea) and usually big tonsils. Most of these children get better with no treatment by 8 years old. It has been suggested that having SDB mean that some children concentrate and behave less well during the day and may learn more slowly than children who don’t snore. It has become common for many Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) surgeons to take out tonsils and adenoids (adenotonsillectomy) for this condition. Removing the tonsils and adenoids (which are normally big at this age) means that most children quickly stop snoring and seem to be cured. Unfortunately it is not clear if this operation makes any difference to learning compared to just watching the child and letting them “grow out” of the condition (watchful waiting).
There is no set treatment in the UK today. You may be offered adenotonsillectomy or watchful waiting; we do not know which, long term, is the right thing to do. Therefore we wish to do a study looking at these two different treatments to see if there is a difference in children’s learning over time between the two different treatments. We will look at children with SDB, measure their learning (and behaviour) and then randomly select which children get one treatment or the other. We will then re-measure learning (and behaviour) 7 months later to see if there is any difference between the two groups. We will also measure their sleep. This is quite a difficult study to do, we are unsure whether families will agree to take part and how easy it will be to measure learning with such young children (aged two and a half to 5).
REC name
North East - Newcastle & North Tyneside 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/NE/0283
Date of REC Opinion
3 Nov 2016
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion