Is your snoring just snoring or something more serious? Do you often feel tired during the day? Have you been told you gasp for air during your sleep? Are you overweight? There are many other key questions that can be asked, but if you answered 'yes' to these three alone it is time to find out more about the quality of your sleep.

SleepStrip can help detect Sleep Apnoea

You may have heard about sleep apnoea. With hundreds of thousands of people suffering from this sleeping disorder in Britain alone, more and more people start to realize their daytime sleepiness may be related to their snoring.

Sleep apnoea sufferers repeatedly stop breathing during the night without knowing. Tissue in the back of the throat causes a blockage so you are literally choked for air. Your brain then tells you to breathe so you briefly wake up (you don't normally remember it the next morning) and refill your lungs with air and go back to sleep. You may be thinking you get 8 hours sleep, but effectively only being getting an hour or so in an undisturbed fashion.

Untreated sleep apnoea results in reduced blood oxygen levels. This may lead to cardiovascular (heart) disease and accelerate disease such as cancer, stroke and diabetes. Your body needs oxygen for its organs to work efficiently. Sleep apnoea patients are constantly starved of oxygen. As their sleep gets disturbed throughout the night they also lose valuable time to restore body function and feel sleepy throughout the day (at the risk of losing their job or falling asleep at the wheel). If you find yourself nodding off watching TV or even during meetings, you have a lot in common with the average sleep apnoea patient.

Do you recognise any of these symptoms?

• You nod off watching TV.
• You don't wake refreshed.
• You have to go to the bathroom often during the night.
• You snore loudly and sometimes wake up gasping for air.
• You are overweight and/or a neck size 17in and up.
• You are irritable and quickly agitated.
• You physically couldn't exercise for more than a few minutes.
• Your concentration is not what it used to be.
• Your work performance has suffered of late.
• You have a smaller jaw or double chin.
• Driving long distance without falling asleep is a struggle.
• Sexual function is not what it used to be.

These are tell-tale signs of sleep apnoea. GPs don't receive a lot of education on sleep and often brush these symptoms off as signs of stress and general fatigue. Trying to get a referral to a sleep clinic in a hospital for clinical diagnosis can be hard when your symptoms don't get recognised by your doctor. This is where the SleepStrip can help.

The SleepStrip is what is called a single channel sleep apnoea screening device. It senses respiratory flow - indicating whether you breathe or not. Its sensors are positioned so it detects air coming from both the nose as well as the mouth and its built-in tiny computer records and analyses these breathing patterns.

After wearing the SleepStrip between your nose and mouth for just one night, a score between 0 and 3 will be recorded:

• 0 = Little to no Sleep Apnoea (fewer than 15 events* per hour detected)
• 1 = Mild Sleep Apnoea (15 - 24 breathing lapses per hour detected)
• 2 = Moderate Sleep Apnoea (25 - 39 breathing interruptions per hour detected)
• 3 = Severe Sleep Apnoea (40 or more stoppages per hour detected)
• If the device encountered an error it will be an 'E' when we read it.

* An event is either an 'apnoea' where you stopped breathing altogether for a number of seconds or a 'hypopnea' where the screening device detected very shallow breathing, which also results in blood oxygen dips.

Note that a score of zero can still mean as much as fourteen events per hour, or in other words, briefly waking every five minutes, causing fragmented sleep and low oxygen levels.

SleepStrip

When you order a SleepStrip you should receive it in 1-2 working days after you ordered it. It fits through the letterbox and requires no prescription. The SleepStrip comes with a detailed questionnaire (developed with Intus Sleep Technicians and Physicians) which helps experienced staff, who have worked with sleep therapy for years, to establish whether your symptoms correspond with obstructive sleep apnoea.

You can return the Sleep Strip with the questionnaire in the pre-paid envelope and you will receive a telephone call within 3-5 working days from receipt. All of this is included in the price. You can then discuss the results and your options with Intus or go to your Doctor to ask for a referral.

NOTE: If you have MANY of the symptoms listed above and suspect you probably DO have sleep apnoea, you are better off going straight for the overnight finger pulse oximetry test we offer, because effective treatment cannot be recommended on the back of a SleepStrip test alone. If you just want some simple feedback for a small price, the SleepStrip is fine.