Sleeping duties: What is Sleep Apnea?

HYDERABAD:  Insomnia and its symptoms are known to all, but not many know that there’s also a sleep disorder named Sleep Apnea. Those who suffer from this order have a problem with breathing that repeatedly starts and stops leaving the patient fatigued on a morning or simply have choking experiencing during sleep. 

Sleep apnea is a major issue in India today, unfortunately not many people are aware if they have the condition and if the treatment is available. An estimated 5.4% of all Indians between the age group of 30-69 (28.8 million) have moderate to severe sleep apnea, according to a 2019 Lancet Respiratory Medicine study. Sleep awareness is low in India, which is evident from the fact that we have only 500 sleep labs in a country with 1.3 billion people.

That’s how ResMed, a diagnosis and treatment platform of Sleep Apnea and COPD  has come up with home sleep tests to test sleep at home. The device is called the ApneaLink Air which can record up to five channels of information: respiratory effort, pulse, oxygen saturation, nasal flow, and snoring. The data collected by the device (Apnea Link Air) is sent via the cloud to a certified sleep specialist who then emails the results to you and guides the patient through the treatment s/he needs as sleep apnea has been strongly linked to a variety of health problems and chronic diseases. 

Talking more about this, Dr Sibasish Dey, Head, Medical Affairs, Asia and Latin America says, ”Considering the low awareness about sleep disorders such as sleep apnea in India and the current disruptions in healthcare, Home Sleep Tests provide an opportunity for healthcare professionals to continue to use digital tools to get patients to have access to diagnosis. 

Our Home Sleep Test is based on remote diagnostic technology and is simple, reliable, and a convenient way to diagnose sleep disorders at home. Instead of having patients sleep in beds at a sleep laboratory with wires hooked up and a technician watching, creating an unnatural sleeping situation at-home testing is a more feasible alternative.”