Smart Tips on Sleep Apnea Testing
March 28th, 2009 Posted by: admin
A great many individuals suffer from a disorder called sleep apnea which causes you to stop respiring while you’re sleeping. While sleep apnea comes in many forms, these generally don’t cause death but there are circumstances that may lead to important medical troubles and place your life in peril. it’s of great relevance to be provided with a sleep apnea test if you have an idea that you are putting up with this disorder.
There are a number of ways that you can tell if you are suffering from sleep apnea, and many unfortunate people suffer from other symptoms or conditions in which sleep problems chronic. For instance , weight gain, fatigue, and mental depression all of which may be caused by sleep problems, and they will also have cotton mouth or waking up often with a panic attack.
Insomnia may be a part of your sleep disorder but the only true way to discern whether or not your symptoms are caused by sleep apnea is to spend some time to be tested for sleep apnea. A sleep apnea test is usually given at a sleep disorder center but can also be administered at a hospital or doctor’s office where the appropriate facilities and equipment are available.
You’ll need to take a physical exam which consists of a physical check on your nose, throat and palate. To better understand your problem there will be of a series of questions regarding how you feel about your quality of sleep. The next step is to have the patient stay overnight where a recording is done.
The test they commonly use to check your sleep health is the PSG or polysomnogram, which is administered in to various forms. The first type of test is the overnight sleep test and is comprised of monitoring the following activities; breathing patterns, heart rate, blood oxygen level, eye movement and brain activity.
The second way this can be tested is at home where a skilled technician attaches the proper electrodes and makes it easy to monitor the patient while they are at home using a PSG. What they will be trying to discern when deciding whether the results of the test are good or bad is a factor called the RDI or respiratory disturbance index.
This expresses in numerical terms the amount of unnatural hitches which disrupted your breathing over the entire test. Following is the common measures used when judging whether or not a person has sleep apnea. If the number of captured events over the period of an hour is higher than twenty then the patient is diagnosed with some form of sleep apnea.
There are additional tests which could be called for like a multiple sleep latency examination which figures out how poorly you are actually sleeping. A normal person requires, on average, roughly 10 minutes to fall into a restful sleep so individuals who can fall asleep in less than five minutes are usually recommended for treatment. A strip test can also be administered prior to the sleep apnea test to see of further testing is needed.
