Sleep Study

A home sleep study is a portable diagnostic test you wear overnight in your own bed. It records your breathing, oxygen levels, heart rate, body position, and respiratory effort while you sleep.

We use home testing rather than traditional in-lab polysomnography because the data quality is high enough to identify clinically meaningful sleep-disordered breathing in most patients, and patients sleep more like they normally do at home — which makes the results more representative.

The setup is simple: a small recording device, a finger sensor, a nasal cannula, and chest and abdomen bands. Most patients are wearing it within 5 minutes.

Sleep apnea is one of the most under-diagnosed conditions in adult medicine. The vast majority of people with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea don't know they have it. They snore, wake up tired, and assume that's just how they sleep.

Untreated sleep apnea is independently associated with hypertension, atrial fibrillation, stroke, insulin resistance, cognitive decline, and accelerated cardiovascular aging. Treating it tends to produce some of the most dramatic improvements we see in clinical practice — better blood pressure, better mood, better cognition, better recovery from training.

Even mild disordered breathing — short of full apnea — can fragment sleep enough to blunt recovery, performance, and metabolic health.

• Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI) — the average number of breathing events per hour of sleep
• Oxygen desaturation index and minimum SpO₂ — how often and how low your oxygen drops
• Respiratory event types — central, obstructive, mixed
• Position-dependent patterns (e.g. supine vs lateral)
• Heart rate variability and resting heart rate during sleep

• Anyone who snores, wakes up unrefreshed, has unexplained daytime fatigue, or wakes up gasping or choking.
• Patients with high blood pressure that's hard to control, atrial fibrillation, or unexplained insulin resistance.
• Anyone with a partner who has noticed pauses in their breathing during sleep.
• Patients who train hard but can't seem to improve — disordered breathing is a common, missed limiter.
• Most adults over 50, particularly men and post-menopausal women, even without obvious symptoms.

• We provide the device with clear instructions, and you wear it for one night at home — no overnight clinic visit required.
• Setup takes about 5 minutes at bedtime. Sleep as you normally would.
• Return the device the next day. We'll have results from the sleep physician and your debrief within about a week.
• If results suggest treatment is warranted, we walk you through options — positional therapy, oral appliances, CPAP, weight and lifestyle factors — and coordinate the next steps.

We focus on more than just AHI. We look at the depth and duration of oxygen desaturations, the dominant event type, position dependence, and how the data connects to your symptoms and the rest of your evaluation.

For mild cases, we often start with non-CPAP options — sleep position training, weight-loss strategies, addressing nasal obstruction, or an oral appliance. For moderate-to-severe cases, CPAP is usually the most effective starting point.

Re-testing depends on what changes. After meaningful weight loss, after starting therapy, or if symptoms shift — those are the moments to look again.