Sleep Apnea Testing Centers
Many individuals suffer from a disorder called sleep apnea which interrupts your rest while you’re trying to sleep. While sleep apnea comes in many forms, these by and large don’t cause death but there are situations where it may cause challenging health troubles and threaten your life. it’s of great relevance to take a sleep apnea test if you think that you could be putting up with this condition.
Several methods are available for determining if you may be experiencing sleep apnea, and many people who suffer have a number of symptoms or may even have sleep apnea as a side effect. Some good examples of this are ,obesity, depression, and chronic fatigue syndrome all may be caused 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.
Insomnia may be a part of your sleep disorder but the best means to determine if your symptoms are induced by 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 center but can also be done at hospitals and clinics that have overnight facilities and diagnostic equipment.
The first thing to do is have a physical exam which is comprised 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 keep you over night where a recording is done.
The test they commonly use to check your sleep health is the PSG or polysomnogram, which can be given via two methods. The first type of test is carried out overnight and consists of monitoring several activities including breathing patterns, heart rate, blood oxygen level, eye movement and brain activity.
The second way this can be tested is at home where the technician simply connects the necessary 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 something called the RDI or the respiratory disturbance index.
This method expresses in data form the number of abnormal events 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 total amount of interruptions over an hour is more than twenty 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 figures out how poorly you are actually sleeping. A normal person requires, on average, around 10 minutes to begin 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 determine if there are further tests needed.