Home Testing For Sleep Apnea

A great many individuals suffer from a complaint known as sleep apnea which causes you to cease breathing while you are trying to sleep. There are several non dangerous types of sleep apnea but there are conditions that could lead to grave medical problems and place your life in danger. That is why it is of the utmost importance to be provided with a sleep apnea test if you have an idea that you’re hurting from this sleep complaint.

There are several ways you can determine if you have a sleep apnea problem, and many who have sleep apnea also have a number of other symptoms in which sleep apnea is a side effect. For instance ,fatigue, gaining weight, and mental tiredness all of which are aggravated by sleep apnea, and they may even experience dryness in he mouth or may wake up experiencing a panic attack like episode, with choking and gasping.

You may also experience insomnia but the only way to know if your symptoms are being caused by sleep apnea or are perhaps the cause of your sleep apnea is to spend some time to be tested for sleep apnea. It is standard for the test to be administered 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.

The first step is a physical exam and part of the test consists of a good hard look at your mouth, throat and sinus areas. There will also be a detailed recording an interview with questions showing your sleep quality, sleep patterns and feelings about how well you are sleeping. The very next step in the process is to keep you over night where a record is kept of how well you sleep.

The most common recording test used during this process is the PSG or polysomnogram, which comes in two varieties. The first type of test is the overnight sleep test and is comprised of monitoring several activities including breathing patterns, heart rate, blood oxygen level, eye movement and brain activity.

The second type covers a home monitoring version of the test where a technician connects the electrodes and allows for more convenient monitoring of the patient at home through the standard PSG. What the doctors are looking for when deciding whether the results of the test are good or bad is a common measure called the respiratory disturbance index of RDI.

This expresses in numerical terms the number of times you experience a negative breathing pattern which occurred in breathing over the course of the test. The following values are usually used when deciding if someone has a sleep apnea issue. If the number of captured events over the period of an hour is higher than twenty the doctor can diagnose the patient with a form of sleep disorder, possibly sleep apnea.

There are additional tests which may also be requested including a multiple sleep latency test that assesses the amount of fatigue which is caused by the lack of restful sleep. Normally, a person requires more than 10 minutes to fall asleep so those who fall straight into a deep sleep in under five minutes should get some intervention. There is also a strip test that may be used just before the sleep apnea test to see of further testing is needed.