A recent study undertaken at the University of Chicago has revealed that screening urine could effectively help diagnose "obstructive sleep apnea" in kids. According to the study' lead author Dr. David Gozal, this particular sleep disorder "usually requires overnight testing using polysomnography" so that it can be differentiated from habitual snoring.

"This would alleviate the need for costly and inconvenient sleep studies in children who snore, only about 20 percent to 30 percent of whom actually have obstructive sleep apnea", Mr. Gozal shared.

For the sake of study, as many as 90 children who snored and had been referred to the sleep clinic for evaluation "for sleep disordered breathing", and 30 healthy, non-snoring children were considered. The researchers then employed an "electrophoresis technique" to test urine for over a hundred proteins simultaneously, and then concluded that various proteins expressed differently in children with apnea as compared to those who simply snored and did not have any related conditions, or did not snore at all.

"It was rather unexpected. However, the field of biomarkers is one that is under marked expansion and this certainly opens the way for possible simple diagnostic screening methods in the future", Mr. Gozal said.

The study has been published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.