Diagnosing Sleep Apnea

A Polysomnography records a variety of your body functions while you are sleeping. The recording of your brain's electrical activity, your eye movement, muscle activity, heart rate, respiratory effort, air flow, and blood oxygen levels are used to diagnose if you have sleep apnea and how severe it is. Various types of electrodes are attached to different areas of your body such as your head to monitor brain wave activity, your temples to monitor eye movements, your chin and to each leg to monitor throat muscle and leg muscle activity, an Oximeter on a finger or ear and a heat sensing probe on the upper lip to monitor your breathing. More electrodes are place on your chest to monitor your heart rhythm while cloth bands are wrap around your chest and abdomen to detect movement of your belly and ribcage.

Sounds scary? It is not! Sure, you will be wired up like a robot but all the information collected provides your doctor or sleep specialist with a detailed account of the number and severity of the apneas/hypopneas that occur while you are sleeping and their effects on your body's oxygen level, sleep stages as well as how many times you start to wake up. The electrodes are quite painless and easily attached and taken off when the tests are finished.

Another test that is used is the Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT). It measures the speed at which you fall asleep during the day when you are normally wide-awake. If you doze off in less than five minutes, then you likely have some type of sleep disorder.

In the next article "A Night At The Sleep Lab" we will look at preparing yourself for your first night in a sleep lab and what typically happens there.

References:

http://www.sleepfoundation.org/publicati...

http://www.apneanet.org/factsapn.htm

http://www.sleepapnea.org/geninfo.html#d...

http://www.sleepapnea.org/brochure.html

http://www.sleep-apnea.ab.ca/symptoms.htm

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/s...

http://familydoctor.org/212.xml

http://www.newtechpub.com/phantom/faq/os...

http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/apnea.ht...

http://www.sleepquest.com/s_osa.html

http://www.apneanet.org/question.htm

http://www.mountainsoul.net/sleep.html

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