Insomnia Tips and Answers

How To Test For Sleep Apnea

A common sleep disorder is called sleep apnea which induces you to stop breathing while you are sleeping. While sleep apnea comes in numerous forms, these in the main don’t cause death but there are situations where it might cause serious health issues and threaten your life. it’s of great relevance to obtain a sleep apnea test if you think that you could be suffering from this sleep 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. For example ,obesity, depression, and chronic fatigue syndrome all may be caused by sleep apnea, 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 take a sleep apnea test. This test is usually administered at a sleep center but can also be done at hospitals and clinics where overnight facilities are available.

The first thing to do is have a physical exam which is comprised of an examination of the throat, the nose, the uvula and the palate. There will also be a detailed recording a list of questions detailing how you feel about your quality of sleep. The next step is to have the patient stay 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 is administered in to various forms. The first variety is the overnight test and involves monitoring several activities including your heart rate, your breathing pattern, your eye movement and also your brain activity.

The second type covers a home monitoring version of the test where the technician simply connects the necessary electrodes and allows for more convenient monitoring of the patient at home through the standard PSG. The result that is being looked for in determining the results of the test is something called the RDI or the respiratory disturbance index.

Numerical terms express the number of times you experience a negative breathing pattern which may have disrupted your pattern of breathing through the night. The following values are usually used when judging whether or not a person has sleep apnea. 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 determines how much your lack of sleep is effecting you. For a normal person, they need 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. A strip test can also be administered in front of the sleep apnea exam in order to determine if there are further tests needed.