If you’re not resting well, a visit with local professionals could lead to dreams coming true.

Publication:The Lawton Constitution;
Date:Apr 30, 2007;
Section:Health & Fitness;
Page Number:11

For 40 million Americans, a good night’s rest is hard to come by. With expansion of its sleep services testing facility, Southwestern Medical Center hopes help Oklahomans to sleep easier.

Almost 10 percent of Comanche County residents have a sleep disorder, said John Austin, the associate administrator of the hospital. “We’re looking at community need,” he said. “A lot of people suffer symptoms and have sleep disorders (and) are unaware of it.”

Linda Nix was one of those people. She and a few other employees of Southwestern Medical Center were given the opportunity to be examined by the sleep center prior to its official opening. In part, her sleep study tested the equipment, but her she and her doctor did learn she has a mild positional sleep apnea — pauses in breathing during sleep. “I thought it would be kind of hard (to fall asleep) because I usually stay up later than that,” she said. She said the recording showed it took her 46 minutes to fall asleep and she woke numerous times. The test also records the number of times the patients moves his or her arms and legs and the duration of each state of sleep. “I was really kind of surprised at how much it recorded,” she said.

John Morris, director of respiratory care, said Southwestern Medical Center has had a polysomnography (sleep studies) service for about 10 years. It had been housed in the respiratory department until recently. He said sleep studies are important because getting enough sleep helps prevent other health problems, and while sleep apnea normally only disrupts sleep, it can be dangerous. The hospital still uses basic sleep studies and the same three tests it has used for years: Constant Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP), Multiple Sleep Latency (MSL) study and Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure (Bi-PAP). The CPAP provides extra air pressure via any number of masks or other apparatuses. “They may have hundreds of sleep events in a few hours. With the extra pressure, it causes the back of the throat to open up, they don’t have any events,” Morris said. The MSL study is a series of daytime naps every two hours that are monitored. The BiPAP is used when someone reacts negatively to the CPAP. Morris said it works on the same principle as a respirator. An upper and lower level of air pressure are set and the machine forces the lungs to move air. He said all the tests are painless but they require the patient to wear a small array of sensors on his or her face and chest.

“It’s not a problem because most of the people are so tired,” he said. “If they have a sleep disorder, they are operating in their daily life at a sleep deficit and are pretty tired.”

Nix said she thought it would be difficult to sleep wearing the 15 penny-sized sensors, as well as the two sensor belts around her chest and abdomen. “It took a long time for them to put (the sensors) on, and I thought ‘this was going to be bad’ because you can’t move around,” she said. “Once you get them on, you really don’t notice them. I felt like I slept better than I usually do at home.”

Morris said while the tests work and allow doctors to diagnose problems correctly, the hospital’s old facility had limitations. “There is always noise throughout the hospital, even in the middle of the night. It is important in a sleep study to have a quiet environment,” he said. “The hospital setting is not ideal for sleep studies — noise, size constraints, hospital beds. You just don’t get the same kind of results.”

The new sleep services testing facility, 1602 SW 82nd on the northwest side of the Behavioral Health Services facility, has four private testing rooms, a central control room and computer networking to the main hospital, he said. “Now we will have the perfect environment. It’s quiet out there, it’s comfortable for the patients, away from people’s cell phones and away from the activities of daily life,” he said. “It’s going to be first-class service for the community. The company that owns the hospital has chosen to make an investment in the service that has been sorely needed.” Each sleep study room has a queen-size bed with pillowtop mattress, an Ionic Breeze air filter and fan, a private full bathroom, a flatpanel TV and multiple-level lighting.

Nix said she was nervous at first at the thought of someone watching her sleep. But she was able to sit in a comfortable chair and relax while she waited for the technicians, and they put her at ease while they were applying the sensors.

“Where they are most comfortable is where they are going to get the best results,” Austin said. “Physicians are going to enjoy it, patients are going to enjoy it, (and) the community is going to benefit from the expanded services.” The new facility opened with four rooms, giving staff the ability to run four tests simultaneously, a total of eight tests per day, Austin said. The original facility had only three converted examination rooms. The new facility can be expanded to support a total of eight rooms. “By pumping $120,000 into a renovation you are going to get the things that are benefits associated with that,” he said. “The accreditation we are moving toward is going to be something that is unique to the county.”