Measurement of peripheral arterial tone to detect sleep-disordered breathing in patients with heart failure

Purpose Sleep-disordered breathing is highly prevalent in patients with heart failure and is related to increased mortality and morbidity. The gold standard for sleep diagnostic is polysomnography in a sleep laboratory. Measurement of peripheral arterial tone with a wrist-worn diagnostic device is a promising method to detect sleep-disordered breathing without major technical effort. Methods We prospectively enrolled patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction for measurement of the peripheral arterial tone and polysomnography simultaneously during one night in the sleep laboratory. Raw data of polysomnography was analyzed blindly by sleep core lab personnel and compared with automatic algorithm-based sleep results of measurement of the peripheral arterial tone. Results A total of 25 patients provided comparable sleep results. All patients had sleep-disordered breathing and were identified by measurement of the peripheral arterial tone. The comparison of apnea-hypopnea index between peripheral arterial tone 38.8 +/- 17.4/h and polysomnography 44.5 +/- 17.9/h revealed a bias of - 5.7 +/- 9.8/h with limits of agreement of +/- 19.2/h in Bland-Altman analysis but showed high and significant Pearson correlation (r = 0.848, p < 0.001). Conclusion The findings suggest that measurement of the peripheral arterial tone may be useful to identify sleep-disordered breathing in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.