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Article #13

One of our audience comments: "I never could sleep on my back. I would snort and grunt and wake myself up so I would not even try. I went for the sleep study and they had me sleep on my back. The result was 97 disturbances per hour or about one every breath. I could have told them that without the sleep study. I was wondering why they would test me that way when I did not sleep that way and had less disturbances on my side. It almost seemed like the fix was in to have me scared to sleep another night without the surgery."

Without arguing the probably valid point that most surgeons are looking to do surgery, I still doubt that your sleep study was designed to scare you by exaggerating your pathology, though it may well unwittingly have done that. Sleep lab technicians, probably aware that sleep apnea patients tend to sleep on their sides, do insist that patients spend some time on their backs. Myself, I found that all the wires and hoses and electrodes constrained my usual side-to-side movements and kind of forced me to spend more time on my back than I usually would.
It is interesting to ask oneself why they would make a point of studying a person in a position he doesn't generally assume in sleep. At one time, it was necessary to show a certain critical frequency of all-out apneas (not hypopneas) to get insurance reimbursement for CPAP and probably it seemed wisest to strive for the most dramatic pathology obtainable at some point in the sleep study for that reason. The fact that the person had already "partly self-treated" their sleep apnea with a positional strategy might actually work against them under those circumstances.
It may also be that their purpose is to demonstrate the fact that their is a marked positional effect on the frequency of apneas, in case that might justify a trial of one of the position-changing devices like the "Tennis Ball Technique" which was been generating a lot of debate lately (see Article #31).

Do you have your own comments to add to discussions above? E-mail me at

kerrinwh@ix.netcom.com

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