Sleep apnea is a condition which induces a painful interruption in respiration while you’re in bed. There are various distinct types and while they are not usually life threatening there are certain conditions where there might be challenging health consequences and place your life at risk. That’s why it’s of the utmost necessity to obtain a sleep apnea test if you believe that you might be losing rest from this trouble.

There are a number of ways that you can tell 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 , weight gain, fatigue, and mental depression all of which may be caused by sleep problems, and they also might have dry mouth or a sudden panic attack upon waking up.
You may experience insomnia along with your sleep disorder but the only true way to discern whether or not your symptoms are caused by sleep apnea is to go to your physician and take a sleep apnea test. A sleep apnea test is usually given 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 and part of the test consists of a physical check on your nose, throat and palate. To better understand your problem there will be of a series of questions regarding the following subjects, sleep quality, patterns, disturbances and impressions. The doctors will want to keep you over night where a recording is done.
The common test to record your sleep patterns is a polysomnogram or PSG, which comes in two varieties. The first type of test is carried out overnight and consists of supervising various activities such as breathing patterns, heart rate, blood oxygen level, eye movement and brain activity.
The second testing type involves a home monitoring version where the technician simply connects the necessary electrodes and allows the patient to monitor their results at home through a polysomnograph. What the doctors are looking for when deciding whether the results of the test are good or bad is something called the RDI or the respiratory disturbance index.
This expresses in numerical terms the amount of unnatural hitches which occurred in breathing over the course of the test. The following values are usually used when diagnosing a patient with 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 assesses the amount of fatigue which is caused by the lack of restful sleep. 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. There is also a strip test that may be used in front of the sleep apnea exam in order to determine if there are further tests needed.