Posts Tagged ‘Dangerous Types’

Sleep Apnea Testing Free Helpful Tip

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Sleep Apnea Testing Free Helpful Tip

Many people suffer from a condition called sleep apnea which causes you to cease respiring while you’re in bed. There are several non dangerous types of sleep apnea but there are distinct conditions where there could be challenging health outcomes and place your life in peril. it’s of great relevance to take a sleep apnea test if you think that you could be suffering from 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.

You may also experience insomnia 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. This test is usually administered at a center for sleep disorders but can be given in a doctor’s office where overnight facilities are available.

The first thing to do is have a physical exam which consists of a physical check on your nose, throat and palate. There will also be a detailed recording of a series of questions regarding how you feel about your quality of sleep. 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 going to be a PSG which stands for a polysomnogram which can be given via two methods. The first type of test is the overnight sleep test and is comprised of monitoring several activities including your heart rate, your breathing pattern, your eye movement and also your brain activity.

The second testing type involves a home monitoring version where a skilled technician attaches the proper electrodes and allows for more convenient monitoring of the patient at home through the standard PSG. What the doctors are looking for in determining the results of the test is a common measure called the respiratory disturbance index of RDI.

This method expresses in data form the number of abnormal events which may have disrupted your pattern of breathing through the night. 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 more than twenty the doctor can diagnose the patient with a form of sleep disorder, possibly sleep apnea.

There are some additional examinations which may also be requested including a multiple sleep latency test that 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. A strip test is also helpful to take just before the sleep apnea test to determine if one is needed.