Night-to-night variability of sleep respiratory pauses in normal infants.

Pneumograms have been recorded for several (6-14) consecutive nights in 11 normal children aged 1-257 days. They enabled to assess greater or equal to 5 seconds respiratory pauses. No statistical differences were found between the number of respiratory pauses per hour recorded during subsequent nights on each subject. Statistically significant (p less than 0.001) differences were found between the children either in the number of pauses or in their intervals. However, the experimental protocol does not allow to assess whether these discrepancies have a genetic, or maturational, or eventually an environmental origin.