Correlations between home sleep apnea tests and polysomnography outcomes do not fully reflect the diagnostic accuracy of these tests

STUDY OBJECTIVES: The clinical performance of home sleep apnea tests (HSATs) can be described by their (diagnostic) accuracy, defined as the percentage agreement with the obstructive sleep apnea severity category (normal, mild, moderate, and severe) based on polysomnography. Rather than reporting on accuracy, there has been a strong reliance in the literature to report correlation coefficients between the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) of HSATs and polysomnography to support claims of diagnostic performance. This is surprising, as it has been well described that correlation coefficients are inadequate to evaluate equivalence between two parameters. The aim of this study was to systematically investigate the magnitude of the discrepancies between correlation coefficients and diagnostic accuracy reported in or retrievable from HSAT validation studies. METHODS: We compared the discrepancy between accuracy and AHI correlation coefficients of all validation papers that met the inclusion criteria. A total of 20 papers were retained, representing a participant pool of 1,652. RESULTS: The weighted average AHI correlation across all 20 papers was 0.82 and the weighted average accuracy was 0.61, highlighting a discrepancy of 0.21 and an overall misdiagnosis rate of 39%. CONCLUSIONS: The results of our study confirm the need for increased scientific rigor in selecting primary performance endpoints to support HSATs’ clinical performance claims.