Sleep Disordered Breathing, Adenotonsillectomy, Cognition and Pre-school Age Children
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2018-04-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
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, patchy 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. Children may be offered adenotonsillectomy or
watchful waiting; it is not know which, long term, is the right thing to do. Therefore the
investigators 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. The
investigators will look at children with SDB, measure their learning (and behaviour) and then
randomly select which children get one treatment or the other. They will then re-measure
learning (and behaviour) 7 months later to see if there is any difference between the two
groups. The investigators will also scientifically measure their sleep. This is possibly
quite a difficult study to do, the investigators are unsure whether families will agree to
take part and how easy it will be to measure learning with such young children (aged 2:6 -
5).