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How is sleep apnea diagnosed?

If your physician suspects you may have sleep apnea disorder , he or she will start by asking you several questions regarding your symptoms and medical history. Before your visit to the doctor, you should think about any symptoms you are experiencing such as daytime fatigue, morning headaches, frequent nighttime awakenings, etc. that may provide more clues to your diagnosis and assess the severity of the problem.

The first sleep apnea test will be an examination of your airway. The physician will look inside your mouth to see the size of your tonsils and whether the soft palate or uvula is enlarged. Next, the physician may examine the inside of your nose. This is performed using a narrow, rigid tube that allows the doctor to examine the nasal airway and sinuses. The doctor may also use a flexible fiberscope, which is a thin tube inserted through the nose to examine the back of the throat.

The “gold standard” test for diagnosing sleep apnea is a polysomnogram, or sleep study. This sleep apnea test is done in a sleep apnea lab in Chicago at one of the many Sleep Diagnostics Center locations at hotels or even in the convenience of your own home. For this test, you will spend the night in a private room at a luxurious hotel (or a mobile testing unit will arrive at your home). After arriving approximately 1 hour before your normal bedtime, the laboratory personnel will hook-up several monitors to your skin that will allow the computers to calculate several measurements such as breaths, air flow, blood oxygen saturation, cardiac activity, and brain activity. The rooms are designed so that data collection goes through a computer port directly to the technician’s suite. In the morning, the monitors are detached and you are free to go home or to work as you would on any other day. You are also able to use the hotel facilities as part of the testing process.

The Chicago Sleep Center offers sleep apnea home testing , where monitors are brought out to your home, assembled, and hooked up. This enables you to undergo testing while sleeping in the comfort and convenience of your own home.

When the results are back from the sleep apnea test (sleep study), you will meet with your physician to discuss treatment options. The sleep study will allow the doctor to not only determine whether or not you have sleep apnea, but how severe the disease is. After these sleep apnea tests are completed, a custom tailored obstructive sleep apnea treatment plan can be designed to meet your needs.
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