Is your snoring getting really bad? Do you often feel tired during the day? Have you been told you gasp for air during your sleep? If any of these questions can be answered with 'yes', it is time to find out whether there is more to your snoring than it simply being a nuisance.

SleepStrip detects Sleep Apnoea

You may have heard about sleep apnoea in the papers lately. 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 literally choke. Because you only briefly wake up (the brain tells you to so you can breathe again) you don't actually remember it the next morning so you may be thinking you get 8 hours sleep but effectively only get 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. Because their sleep gets disturbed throughout the night they also loose valuable time to restore body function and feel sleepy throughout the day (at the risk of loosing their job or falling asleep at the wheel). If you find yourself nodding off watching TV or during meetings even, 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 16 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.
• 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 get much 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; 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 analyzes these breathing patterns.

After wearing the SleepStrip between your nose and mouth for just one night, a score between 0 and 3 will show on its display:

• 0 - 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)

* 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.

SleepStrip

If the device encountered an error, the letter 'E' will show, with the 3 legs showing towards the SleepStrip (not to be confused with a '3' pointing away from the SleepStrip).

You can then discuss these results with your doctor to persuade him or her with objective data and hopefully get booked into a sleep clinic where they can test you further. Oftentimes they will then monitor your blood oxygen levels during one night before prescribing you with a suitable method of treatment, such as CPAP.

When you order a SleepStrip here on EU-PAP you can expect it 1-2 working days after you ordered it. It fits through the letterbox and requires no prescription.