Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Sleep studies have been scored using older criteria published in 1968 for many years. This older criteria has been criticized because it yielded low inter-rater reliability and was developed specifically for young healthy adults, and therefore lacked generalizability to elderly subjects and various patient populations. To address these concerns, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) published a revised scoring manual in 2007 that emphasized objectivity in scored parameters. To date, the 2007 AASM criteria has facilitated improvement in inter-rater reliability and become the standard for scoring sleep. The differences in sleep parameters obtained using the 2007 AASM criteria compared to the older 1968 criteria required a re-appraisal of the normal values of sleep. In a paper recently accepted for publication by Lancet Respiratory Medicine, we performed a comprehensive statistical review (i.e. meta-analysis) of normal sleep study parameters scored using the 2007 AASM criteria. We included 169 studies published between January 1, 2007 and July 31, 2016 that evaluated 5,273 healthy adults. This large meta-analysis provides many insights into how sleep changes with age and illustrates sex differences using robust summary values. The objective of this dissemination project is to widely disseminate the normal sleep data reported in our recently accepted meta-analysis. We propose the development of an interactive website that would be available to clinicians, researchers and the general public. Users would enter age and sex data, and our interactive website would provide an accurate range of values for the sleep study parameter of interest. In order to disseminate information about our interactive website, we have obtained support from the Canadian Sleep and Circadian Network, the Royal College Specialty Committee in Neurology, and other Canadian stakeholders in sleep medicine.