Raffles Hospital offers new method to accurately test for sleep apnea.

SINGAPORE—If you snore when you sleep, you're certainly not alone.

Doctors say one in four snores in his sleep. And the older you get, the more likely you'll snore, due to diminished muscle tone.

Almost one in two older men and women aged 60 and above, snores in their sleep.

What's more disturbing is that snoring can sometimes be due to what's known as "obstructive sleep apnea"—that's when you stop breathing while you're asleep.

Raffles Hospital has introduced a new sleep test that is supposed to be more accurate in pinpointing where the obstruction is.

The test can even be done in the comfort of your home, so there's no need to go to hospital.

Doctors say if you stop breathing in your sleep more than five times an hour, you have mild sleep apnea. If it is more than 40 times an hour, then the condition is considered severe.

Those who have obstructive sleep apnea can be treated by wearing an air mask. Another method is surgery to remove the tissue that is blocking the airway.

Most hospitals that conduct sleep tests require patients to be strapped down to be monitored overnight.

This is uncomfortable and can only tell how often the patient stops breathing in his sleep.

It does not identify where the obstruction to breathing is or what exactly the obstruction is. This could be the tongue, tonsils or polyps in the nose.

But now patients have another option—the Apnea Graph test offered by Raffles Hospital.

A patient needs to drop in at the clinic, so that a doctor can insert a fine catheter down the airway.

He can then head home with the catheter, which is lined with four temperature and pressure sensors. These will track where and when the patient stops breathing as he sleeps.

Dr Stephen T S Lee, who is a consultant ear, nose & throat surgeon at Raffles Hospital, said, "Currently your doctor would generally use a telescope to access your airway, make an eyeball assessment and determine—based on his or her assessment—what's the level of obstruction.

"It has been the only real technique that we had to date to analyse the level of obstruction. That's what we've been using. However when you analyse the level of obstruction based on telescopic examination, you do suffer from a few weaknesses.

"Firstly it's subjective. You're not able to quantify your outcome. It's based on a snapshot, meaning that you take it at one point in time, and it is not being done of a patient who is sleeping but a person who is awake.

"Unfortunately we know that the dynamics of the airway movement in sleep are very different from a person who's awake."

He went on to explain the advantage of the Apnea Graph test offered by Raffles Hospital.

"The advantage of this technique is that your results are based on a continuous six hours of recording, and it's being done in actual sleep condition. And you're able to quantify the problem.

"In other words, the results can come like that—you can say that it might be 90% upper airway obstruction...and 10% in the lower. So a person who comes back with that kind of results would be a patient that's likely to do well in surgery.

"We have very effective surgeries for treating the palate and treating the nose. Such a patient would have his results improved...up to 80% (success rate). With this technique, we can save patients from unnecessary surgeries."

Raffles Hospital claims it is the only hospital in Singapore which has performed over a dozen Apnea Graph tests since May, putting it in the forefront of a sleep apnea treatment that is becoming the standard in Europe. - CNA/ir

This is a news article published by Channel NewsAsia on August 31st, 2007.