Obstructive sleep apnea patients adhere to positive airway pressure treatment just as well whether diagnosis and titration occur at home or in the sleep laboratory, researchers found.
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polysomnography
Nov
16
2010
Home sleep studies not a compliance barrier
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Patients with suspected obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) may no longer have to spend an expensive and uncomfortable night at a sleep center to monitor their sleep-disordered breathing.
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Cephalon announced that Mayo Clinic Proceedings published data from a Phase III trial of Nuvigil (armodafinil) Tablets [C-IV] demonstrating it significantly improved wakefulness throughout the shift in patients with excessive sleepiness associated with shift work disorder.
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Jul
30
2009
Removing tonsils & adenoids offers long-term benefits to children with sleep-breathing problems
Children with sleep-related breathing disorders appear to sleep better about 2½ years after they had surgery to remove their tonsils and adenoids (glands in the back of the throat) than they did before the procedure. The same children did not sleep as well at any point than they did six months after the surgery, though, according to a report in the July, 2009 issue of Archives of Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.
Initial improvements in their behavior were maintained except when measured by an index of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms.
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Increasingly severe sleep-related breathing disorders in older men appear to be associated with a greater risk of abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias), according to a report in the June 22, 2009, issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In addition, different types of breathing problems appear more closely associated with different categories of arrhythmia.
Sleep-disordered breathing is a common condition, according to background information in the article. It causes a number of physiologic events that could be stressful to the cardiovascular system, including inadequate blood oxygen levels at night and activation of the sympathetic nervous system (associated with the body’s fight-or-flight response).
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Results of a study published in the June 15, 2009 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine show that complaints of fatigue and tiredness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) improved significantly with good adherence to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy, suggesting that — like the symptom of excessive daytime sleepiness — these complaints are important symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea.
The results demonstrate good adherence to CPAP therapy for an average of five or more hours per night resolved baseline complaints of fatigue in 45 of 80 participants (56 percent), tiredness in 56 of 96 participants (58 percent) and sleepiness in 48 of 72 participants (67 percent); improvement of each symptom was significantly better among CPAP-adherent participants than among inadequately treated subjects. A baseline complaint of lack of energy also was resolved in 47 of 100 participants with good CPAP adherence, but this improvement failed to reach statistical significance when compared with inadequately treated participants.
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A research abstract presented at Sleep 2009 demonstrates that sleep selectively preserves memories that are emotionally salient and relevant to future goals when sleep follows soon after learning. Effects persist for as long as four months after the memory is created.
Results show the sleeping brain seems to calculate what’s most important about an experience and then selects only what is adaptive for consolidation and long-term storage. Across delays of 24 hours, or even three-to-four months, sleeping soon after learning preserved the trade-off as compared to waiting an entire day before going to sleep.
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Research findings presented at Sleep 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, a link exists between the severity of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and weight gain.
Results indicate that people with an apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), the average of the combined episodes of apnea and hypopnea that occur per hour of sleep, of over 15 had an increase in body mass index (BMI) of 0.52 kg/m2 compared to those with an AHI between five and 15, who saw an increase of 0.22 kg/m2.
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A recently published study that is the first to assess the effectiveness of treating sleep disorders in adults with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) shows treatment may result in the objective resolution of the sleep disorder without improvements in daytime sleepiness or neuropsychological function.
Results show that in brain-injured subjects with obstructive sleep apnea, three months of treatment with CPAP therapy dramatically reduced the severity of OSA from 31.4 to 3.8 apneas and hypopneas per hour of sleep; however, there was no demonstrable improvement in measures of daytime sleepiness.
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