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Sleep Apnea Testing Equipment

Sleep apnea is a complaint which induces you to quit respiring while you’re endeavoring to sleep. There are several distinct forms and while they are not ordinarily life endangering there are situations where it may cause serious health troubles and expose you to life threatening dangers. This is why it is essential to be administered a sleep apnea exam if you have a belief that you’re hurting from this sleep condition.

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 also might have dry mouth or a sudden panic attack upon waking up.

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 center but can also be done at hospitals and clinics that have overnight facilities and diagnostic equipment.

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 should also be a list of questions detailing how you feel about your quality of sleep. The doctors will want to have you sleep with them overnight where a video record is made of how you slept.

The common test to record your sleep patterns is the PSG or polysomnogram, which comes in two varieties. The first variety is the overnight test and involves monitoring several activities including your breathing, heart rate, level of oxygen in your blood and your brain level.

The second type covers a home monitoring version of the test where a technician connects the electrodes and allows the patient to monitor their results at home through a polysomnograph. The result that is being looked for in determining the results of the test is a common measure called the respiratory disturbance index of RDI.

This expresses in numerical terms the amount of unnatural hitches which disrupted your breathing over the entire test. The following values are usually used when deciding if someone has a sleep apnea issue. If the number of abnormal events in an hour is over twenty in number the doctor can diagnose the patient with a form of sleep disorder, possibly sleep apnea.

There are additional tests which may be requested such as a multiple sleep latency exam which assesses the amount of fatigue which is caused by the lack of restful sleep. For a normal person, they need around 10 minutes to begin to fall asleep 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 determine if there are further tests needed.