November 2017 – Assembly of National Sleep Societies (ANSS)
The ANSS Executive Committee met in Prague to prepare the agenda for the next ANSS convention that will take place in Parma (Italy) on May 4 and 5, 2018.
The potential topics of the meeting will focus on the following:
- occupational health and chronobiology (in tune with the recent Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine assigned to research on circadian rhythms);
- the possibility to create a network with the general practitioners of the single European countries to define shared guidelines for the diagnosis and management of the most common sleep disorders;
- attractive sleep-related projects for the achievement of Horizon 2020 grants;
- update of the Task Force “Beyond AHI” that held its first physical meeting in Prague. The main objectives are:
- To investigate the role of other diagnostic methods beyond the AHI to diagnose sleep disordered breathing in adults based on standardized literature review and professional expertise.
- Provide suggestions for future research on promising diagnostic methods that can be developed further for clinical use and provide recommendations for signal measurement and event scoring of relevant signals.
The Task Force will be composed of 10 sections of interest:
- RDI and AHI critical aspects
- Actual flow measurements
- Oxygen signal
- Respiratory effort
- Snoring
- ECG and pulse signals
- EEG
- CO2
- Position
- New methods to assess sleep apnea
The sections are not closed isolated entities but will interact on the common overlapping issues. The deadline for the presentation of the Task Force achievements is December 2018. The ANSS meeting in May 2018, will be a topical opportunity to update the ongoing activities and overcome critical issues. A follow-up meeting of the Task Force is planned at the ESRS conference in Basel in September.
Liborio Parrino
Chair, on behalf of the EC ANSS