(Press-News.org) In a randomized trial, Mass General Brigham researchers found the surgical removal of tonsils and adenoids was effective for children with snoring and mild sleep apnea
An estimated 6 to 17 percent of children have sleep-disordered breathing, ranging from snoring to sleep apnea, which can cause behavioral, neurocognitive, cardiovascular, and cardiometabolic issues. A new study from Mass General Brigham researchers reveals that adenotonsillectomy—the surgical removal of tonsils and adenoids—is an effective early intervention for these children. Their results are published in JAMA Pediatrics.
“To my knowledge, ours is the first randomized trial to evaluate healthcare utilization amongst children with sleep-disordered breathing,” said corresponding author Susan Redline, MD, MPH, director of Programs in Sleep Medicine Epidemiology and Sleep and Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. “Our findings demonstrate that overall healthcare utilization is reduced with adenotonsillectomy surgery, supporting early intervention for children with mild sleep-disordered breathing. Excluding the post-operative period, this means that for every 100 children, 125 encounters and 253 prescriptions can be avoided in the first year following surgery.”
Unlike prior retrospective studies on the impact of early adenotonsillectomies on sleep-disordered breathing, this new study was a randomized, 12-month trial. Between 2016 and 2022, the researchers followed 381 children ages 3 to 13 with mild sleep-disordered breathing. Children that underwent early adenotonsillectomies had 32 percent fewer doctor visits and 48 percent fewer prescriptions than their counterparts that did not receive surgeries.
Authorship: In addition to Redline, Mass General Brigham authors include Jessie P Bakker and Rui Wang. Additional authors include Fang Zhang, Raouf Amin, Cristina M Baldassari, Ronald D Chervin, Susan L Garetz, Fauziya Hassan, Sally Ibrahim, Stacey L Ishman, Erin M Kirkham, Ariel Linden, Ron B Mitchell, Kamal Naqvi, Carol L Rosen, Kristie Ross, Ignacio E Tapia, Lisa R. Young, and Phoebe K Yu.
Disclosures: Redline reports consulting fees from Eli Lilly; serving as an unpaid consultant to ApniMed Inc., unrelated to this manuscript; unpaid Board of Director for the National Sleep Foundation and Alliance of Sleep Apnea Partners; and grants from NIH that supported this work. Additional disclosures for authors can be found in the paper.
Funding: This study was supported by research contracts 1U01HL125307 and 1U01HL125295 from the National Institute of Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
Paper cited: Bakker, JP et al. “Effect of adenotonsillectomy on healthcare utilization in children with snoring and mild sleep apnea” JAMA Pediatrics DOI: 10.1001/jamapediatrics.2025.0023
###
About Mass General Brigham
Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.
END
About The Study: This cohort study found that statin use was associated with a reduced risk of hepatocellular carcinoma and hepatic decompensation in patients with chronic liver disease. These findings provide support for the potential role of statins in prevention of hepatocellular carcinoma and liver disease progression.
Corresponding Authors: To contact the corresponding authors, email Jonggi Choi, MD, PhD, (j.choi@amc.seoul.kr) and Raymond T. Chung, MD, (chung.raymond@mgh.harvard.edu).
To ...
About The Study: In this longitudinal observational cohort study, gender-affirming hormone therapy was associated with lower rates of moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms, highlighting the importance of gender-affirming primary care models for transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse patients.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Sari L. Reisner, ScD, MA, email sreisner@umich.edu.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.0955)
Editor’s ...
What: Surgical removal of enlarged tonsils and adenoids in children with mild sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) appears to significantly reduce the frequency of medical office visits and prescription medicine use in this group, according to a clinical study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The findings, published in JAMA Pediatrics, show that the surgery, called adenotonsillectomy, was tied to a 32% reduction in medical visits and a 48% reduction in prescription use among children with a mild form of the condition.
SDB refers to breathing disturbances during sleep ...
Stuttgart – A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart developed a biohybrid micro swimmer covered with magnetic material, whose swimming ability is largely unaffected by the coating. The team from the Physical Intelligence Department at MPI-IS published their work in the journal Matter, which covers a wide range of materials science research.
In nature, the ten-micron small, single-cell microalgae are fantastic swimmers, propelled by their two whip-like ...
Impact Journals is proud to participate in the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2025, taking place April 25-30 in Chicago, Illinois.
BUFFALO, NY- March 17, 2025 – Impact Journals is pleased to announce its participation as an exhibitor at the upcoming American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2025. The meeting is scheduled for April 25-30, 2025, at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois.
The 2025 AACR Annual Meeting theme, “Unifying Cancer Science and Medicine: A Continuum of Innovation ...
The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first direct images of carbon dioxide in a planet outside the solar system in HR 8799, a multiplanet system 130 light-years away that has long been a key target for planet formation studies.
The observations provide strong evidence that the system’s four giant planets formed in much the same way as Jupiter and Saturn, by slowly building solid cores. They also confirm Webb can do more than infer atmospheric composition from starlight measurements—it can directly analyze the chemistry ...
A National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored clinical trial of a candidate vaccine to prevent Lassa fever has begun enrolling participants at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore. Lassa fever is a viral hemorrhagic disease that can be fatal and that causes permanent hearing loss in up to one-third of those who contract it. Lassa virus is spread by rodents, known as multimammate rats, that are native to many countries in West Africa. The virus can also be spread from person to person. Currently, there are no specific drug treatments or vaccines for Lassa fever. NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and ...
(Note: The following press release was prepared by Brunel University of London.)
Abortion is murder – the emotive rallying cry popular with pro-life campaigners keen to convert others to their cause. But what if opposition to abortion isn’t all about sanctity-of-life concerns, and instead at least partly about discouraging casual sex?
That’s what psychology researchers found in experiments designed to test what really drives anti-abortion attitudes in the USA. The study, published today in ...
As global electricity demand grows, traditional energy sources are under strain. Oceans, which cover more than 70% of Earth’s surface, offer vast potential for clean energy from renewable resources such as ocean currents and waves.
However, marine renewable energy development is still in its early stages compared to wind and solar power. One challenge is identifying the most feasible and economically viable locations for ocean current energy projects. While many studies have focused on regional ocean current energy resource assessment, a global evaluation based on actual data has been lacking – until now.
Using more ...
New York, NY [March 17, 2025]—Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine have developed a powerful AI tool, built on the same transformer architecture used by large language models like ChatGPT, to process an entire night’s sleep. To date, it is one of the largest studies, analyzing 1,011,192 hours of sleep. Details on their findings were reported in the March 13 online issue of the journal Sleep [https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaf061].
The model, called patch foundational transformer for sleep (PFTSleep), ...
