Articles: Insomnia

Sleep apnea is a condition which induces you to stop breathing while you are asleep. While sleep apnea comes in many forms, these in the main do not cause death but there are particular circumstances where there may be challenging health consequences and expose you to life threatening dangers. it's of great relevance to take a sleep apnea test if you think that you might be hurting from this sleep condition.

Several methods are available for determining if you are suffering from sleep apnea, and many who have sleep apnea also have a number of other symptoms in which sleep apnea is 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 take a sleep apnea test. 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 physical check on your nose, throat and palate. There should also 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 recording is done.

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 variety is the overnight test and involves monitoring several activities including your breathing, heart rate, level of oxygen in your blood and your brain level.

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. What they will be trying to discern in judging if the test is positive or negative is a common measure called the respiratory disturbance index of RDI.

Numerical terms express the number of times you experience a negative breathing pattern which may have disrupted your pattern of breathing through the night. Here is the list of values frequently used when diagnosing a patient with sleep apnea. If the total amount of interruptions over an hour is over twenty in number then the patient is usually recommended for treatment.

Occasionally, there are some added exams which could be called for like a multiple sleep latency examination which assesses the amount of fatigue which is caused by the lack of restful sleep. For a normal person, they need more than 10 minutes to fall asleep so those who fall asleep in five minutes are considered good candidates 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.