Be Healthy

A great many folks suffer from a disorder called sleep apnea which interrupts your rest while you’re in bed. While sleep apnea comes in many varieties, these generally do not cause death but there are circumstances that could lead to serious medical troubles and threaten your life. it’s of great relevance to obtain a sleep apnea test if you think that you might be suffering from this sleep disorder.

There are several ways you can determine if you are suffering from sleep apnea, and many people who suffer have a number of symptoms or may even have sleep apnea as a side effect. For example ,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.

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 go to your physician and take a sleep apnea test. 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 thing to do is have a physical exam which consists of a good hard look at your mouth, throat and sinus areas. To better understand your problem there will be a list of questions detailing 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 test they commonly use to check your sleep health 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 breathing patterns, heart rate, blood oxygen level, eye movement and brain activity.

The second type covers a home monitoring version of the test where the technician simply connects the necessary electrodes and makes it easy to monitor the patient while they are at home using a PSG. The result that is being looked for in judging if the test is positive or negative is a factor called the RDI or respiratory disturbance index.

This method expresses in data form the number of abnormal events which may have disrupted your pattern of breathing through the night. 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 more than twenty then the patient is diagnosed with some form of sleep apnea.

Occasionally, there are some added exams which may also be requested including a multiple sleep latency test that figures out how poorly you are actually sleeping. Normally, a person requires roughly 10 minutes to fall into a restful sleep so individuals who can fall asleep in less than five minutes are usually recommended for treatment. There is also a strip test that may be used just before the sleep apnea test to determine if there are further tests needed.