Huge Breakthrough in Sleep Apnea Scoring

As I’ve written about previously on Substack, in research publications, and in my books, scoring methods for understanding sleep apnea severity are crude tools at best, which is exactly the point made by researchers at the Mount Sinai Hospital group in NY. They invented a new automated technique to more precisely measure the burden of sleep apnea.

The current approach called AHI or RDI measures breathing in 30 second intervals, arbitrarily, and declares a breathing event depending on what happens in these 30 seconds.

The new technique is more precise as it analyzes each and every breath to define its unique status. They use a term “ventilatory burden;” in simpler language, they are searching for how much volume of air breathed during each breath. Smaller breaths are abnormal and serve as the principle point of analysis to determine severity.

The remarkable aspect of the work is the absence of measures for sleep or oxygen; and, through their analyses conducted on large databases of several thousand people, totaling 34 million unique breaths, they were able to link the ventilatory burden to cardiovascular risk.

Their overarching goal would provide doctors and patients with a much better measuring stick to assess sleep apnea severity and hopefully in the process convince insurance companies and the rest of the sleep medicine community to abandon the outdated AHI/RDI metric.

I hope you will share this post with friends and family who may be struggling with their sleep. It could be a life-saver.