Night to Night Sleep Variability
This recent piece in Sleep Review Magazine broaches the up and coming consideration for monitoring night to night sleep patterns, including sleep depth and quality of sleep. Nearly all the article focuses on diagnostic purposes and makes some useful points on the nature of sleep variability affecting how we understand and treat patients with sleep disorders. The most interesting portion is on the developing capability for monitoring night to night sleep breathing events and a few other metrics to gain a clearer picture of the patient’s sleep problems.
The most important part of the discussion revolves around the use of Dr. Magdy Younes’ ORP metric for measuring sleep depth, a newer tool that provides much greater precision in evaluating sleep compared to typical sleep staging metrics used in current sleep centers and laboratories. If you’re interested in knowing more about this scientifically validated method, you can look at their business enterprise, Cerebra.
Last, the one thing missing from the article was any discussion on using night to night variability measurements on PAP users, which could rapidly demonstrate why CPAP devices are inferior to the use of advanced PAP devices such as ASV or ABPAP. With CPAP we expect higher ORP averages indicating more superficial sleep compared to lower ORP averages with advanced PAP, indicating deeper sleep.