Swedish police have arrested a woman on suspicion of keeping her daughters confined to an apartment amid media reports that they were locked away for a decade.

Police suspected the 59-year-old woman had "restricted her children's freedom ... for quite a few years," spokeswoman Ewa-Gun Westford told AFP.

According to tabloid Expressen, one of the now adult children managed to briefly leave the apartment and convince a neighbour to call the police, saying that they had been locked up for over a decade.

"The blinds were always pulled down there and we haven't heard any noise from the apartment," a neighbour told the paper.

Expressen also reported that the woman had moved the children around to different locations in an effort to keep them away from their father.

Investigators were questioning the woman and the children, all aged over 18, at a police station in the southern town of Kristianstad.