"The average success rate of a physician to accurately diagnose a sleep-disordered breathing using clinical skills alone is between 60 to 65 percent, which means that 30 percent of children sent to surgery do not need surgery," said David Gozal, MD, a pediatric sleep specialist at the University of Chicago Medical Center. "That is a wrong way to approach medicine, especially since you don’t know if the disease is present or whether the risk-benefit of doing surgery is justified."
To help otolaryngologists determine the best use of PSG when faced with a child who has sleep-disordered breathing and is being considered for tonsillectomy, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) recently published practice guidelines.
As with previous AAO-HNS guidelines, these were developed by a committee composed of experts from the numerous specialties that manage children with sleep-disordered breathing, including anesthesiology, pulmonology, otolaryngology, pediatrics and sleep medicine, and are meant only to guide clinical practice, not to replace clinical judgment.
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