Sleep Apnea can be a serious medical condition if not treated and manifests itself whilst you are asleep. The symptoms are you stop breathing for a period of time before normal breathing begins again. This can and does reduce blood flow to the brain and the sufferer usually won’t have any recall upon awakening.
Now a group of researchers in Australia think they have come up with an unobtrusive way to easily and accurately (90%) identify and diagnose this condition.
The usual method is to monitor your sleep in a sleep clinic – you’re wired up to machines which can detect these breathing pauses. This is an expensive and disruptive method of diagnosis so anything that makes it easier and therefore cheaper is a great breakthrough.
The Australian researchers have discovered that snoring is a prime predictor of sleep apnea and have managed to develop a technique that uses the snoring sounds to diagnose who has sleep apnea and who just snores loudly.
The exciting aspect of this discovery is it’s phenomenal accuracy which is over 90% if this technique is found to be consistently reliable it will revolutionise the diagnosis of sleep apnea and has the possibility of saving many lives by ensuring people get more timely treatment for this sometimes deadly condition.
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