Episode # 3 • 17 Jan 2025
Comprehensive Sleep Apnea Management in Children
Why does a snoring child so often need more than one specialty to get better? On this episode of BackTable ENT & Allergy, host Dr. Ashley Agan welcomes Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown, a triple board certified sleep medicine physician and founder of a boutique sleep practice in Horsham, Pennsylvania, to map the multidisciplinary pediatric sleep team. They cover in-lab polysomnography and its access bottleneck, the evidence for home sleep apnea testing in children, myofunctional therapy, the rise of airway informed pediatric dentistry, mouth taping, comorbid insomnia, restless sleep, and the role of weight in persistent disease.
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction
06:27 - Building the Multidisciplinary Sleep Team
10:03 - Sleep Studies in Children
13:34 - Home Testing vs Lab Testing
17:27 - Myofunctional Therapy and Airway Dentistry
21:04 - ENT Referrals and Adjunct Care
27:36 - Pediatric Dentistry and Cone Beam CT
31:30 - REM Sleep and Objective Data
34:57 - Mouth Taping, Nasal Breathing, and Red Flags
38:41 - Comorbid Insomnia and Behavioral Disorders
44:10 - Restless Sleep and Restless Legs Syndrome
47:20 - Obesity, Weight Loss, and Persistent OSA
52:35 - Key Takeaways and Closing Thoughts
Resources
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More about this episode
Dr. Afolabi-Brown describes herself as the quarterback of the team, ordering the study that stages the child and deciding who gets called in and when. She walks through the pros and cons of in-lab testing against home testing, including the limits imposed by missing electroencephalography and carbon dioxide monitoring, and names the children who should stay in the lab. The conversation then turns to where surgery stops and other care begins: myofunctional therapy as an adjunct rather than a cure, cone beam imaging that finds children nobody had flagged, behavioral sleep disorders that outnumber apnea, restless legs and iron stores, and weight management in the child with persistent disease. The conversation closes on referral, follow up, and keeping one point person for the family.
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