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SLEEP 2026 | IPSA Transition Task Force recommendations for transitioning pediatric to adult sleep care
Umakanth Katwa, MD, Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA, discusses the development of IPSA Transition Task Force recommendations for transitioning pediatric patients with sleep disorders to adult care. Dr Katwa emphasizes the importance of identifying patient needs, assessing readiness for transition, and involving a multidisciplinary team. This interview took place at the 40th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) in Baltimore, MD.
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Transcript
I’m the chair of the task force. We are in the process of developing these guidelines. There is not much literature in the pediatric sleep medicine regarding transition, but I think that is getting a little bit more attention these days. So in this regard, in SLEEP 2026, there is a lot of focus on transition medicine, particularly for all the chronic disorders of sleep, including obstructive sleep apnea...
I’m the chair of the task force. We are in the process of developing these guidelines. There is not much literature in the pediatric sleep medicine regarding transition, but I think that is getting a little bit more attention these days. So in this regard, in SLEEP 2026, there is a lot of focus on transition medicine, particularly for all the chronic disorders of sleep, including obstructive sleep apnea. So as far as the transition is concerned, it is not one-size-fits-all. You need to have a three-tiered system where the most simple patient can be transitioned between pediatric specialist to adult specialist. Then comes the children with underlying complex medical conditions, such as Down syndrome, other genetic disorders, which need specialists to understand the diseases in adult specialty. And then comes the third tier, which are children with extremely complex sleep disorders, such as congenital hyperventilation syndrome, children with severe comorbidities, including Down syndrome, autism, or tracheostomy, and ventilators. Those patients need a multidisciplinary transition, which includes a respiratory therapist, sleep specialist, pulmonologist, neurologist, social worker, and so on and so forth. So in this regard, the first is to identify who are your patients, what age you want to transition, how stable they are, and who is the accepting physician? Where they’re going to go? Is the patient prepared for the transition? Does he understand the disease burden? And what is the condition he’s being treated for, the teenager? And then the parents. And then depending on that, you can start assessing, which typically should start pretty early in their teenage years, between 12 to 14 years of age, and keep on assessing until they are ready, between 18 to 21 years of age. And then for the complex patients, it could be 18 to 25 years of age, and extremely complex, depending on the availability of the resources, can transition between, again, 20 to 25, or sometimes in some institutes, they may see up to 30 years. So it’s basically developing a team who really understands the problems of teenagers or childhood diseases in adult medicine.
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