Editorial
A quagmire for clinicians: when technological advances exceed clinical knowledge
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Obstructive sleep apnoea hypopnoea syndrome (SAHS) is currently
estimated to affect between 2% and 25% of the adult
population.1 2 Increasingly, data indicate that
obstructive SAHS, if untreated, may result in both short and long term
sequelae including daytime sleepiness, poor quality of life,
neuropsychological impairment, hypertension, and cardio-cerebrovascular
diseases.3 Its high prevalence and potentially substantial
morbidity present challenges to the health care system and to
individual care providers to diagnose and identify those individuals at
greatest risk of obstructive SAHS related complications and those most
likely to benefit from specific interventions. On the one hand, the
costs associated with evaluation with the "gold standard"
(overnight laboratory based multichannel polysomnography) could
exceed $1500/patient. In the USA this cost alone could result in annual
health care expenditures of >$18 billion if all adults with suspected
SAHS were tested.4 On the other hand, the economic costs
of untreated SAHS are substantial. These, however,
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