March 21st is World Sleep Day.

Among various sleep disorders, sleep apnea cannot be ignored.

According to epidemiological surveys, 1 billion adults worldwide suffer from sleep apnea, and at least 60 million people in China suffer from it.

  Han Fang, secretary-general of the World Sleep Society and director of the Center for Respiratory Sleep at Peking University People's Hospital, said that sleep apnea syndrome is a sleep disorder characterized by repeated pauses in breathing during sleep, and is often overlooked in the early stages.

According to Han Fang, one in five snorers suffers from obstructive sleep apnea.

Sleep apnea often causes physical and mental damage such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and mood changes, and also affects pregnant women and fetuses. The sudden death rate of people with sleep apnea syndrome is three times higher than that without the disease.

  At present, the traditional means of evaluating sleep situation is polysomnography, through which polysomnography including EEG, eye movement, and electromyography is obtained.

Lv Yunhui, deputy chief physician of the Sleep Center of the First People's Hospital of Yunnan Province, believes that although traditional polysomnography monitoring is highly accurate, the inspection is cumbersome and time-consuming, requires high technical requirements, cannot be popularized, and is difficult to meet the needs of patients with sleep-disordered breathing. The need for early diagnosis and early treatment.

  In recent years, portable sleep apnea monitors have been widely used in clinical practice.

Different from polysomnography, the portable sleep apnea monitor mainly obtains information on breathing during sleep, including nasal airflow breathing, chest and abdominal breathing movements, blood oxygen saturation, etc. This kind of information helps to understand abnormal breathing event.

  Guo Xiheng, director of the Sleep Medicine Center of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, found that sleep apnea is highly correlated with blood oxygen saturation. Apnea for a certain period of time will lead to a significant decrease in blood oxygen saturation. Therefore, the oxygen desaturation index can be used to evaluate breathing. Suspension situation.

In addition, monitoring of blood oxygen saturation can also measure pulse-related information.

Pulse and heart rate changes are closely related to the functional state of sympathetic autonomic nerves, and the regularity of autonomic functional state changes is closely related to the range of respiration changes.

Therefore, information about the patient's breathing can be estimated by means of special algorithms.

  Guo Xiheng said that out-of-hospital examinations and in-ward monitoring of patients with obstructive sleep apnea can be carried out through portable sleep monitors, which can also reduce risks during the new coronary pneumonia epidemic.

  Zhang Xiaolei, deputy director of the third department of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of China-Japan Hospital, pointed out that the monitoring of blood oxygen saturation is widely used in foreign countries. play a role”.

  Han Fang said: "Any technology has limitations. How can blood oxygen saturation monitoring technology be better used in clinical practice? It is necessary to develop and establish a chronic disease management model to overcome the limitations of technology." In addition, the treatment of sleep-related diseases often requires Multidisciplinary collaboration.