An article at the Future of Personal Health repeats statistics about the prevalence of sleep apnea, backing up contentions from sleep specialists that sleep apnea is vastly under diagnosed. “According to a 2016 Frost & Sullivan report, the prevalence of OSA is on the rise,” writes Joseph W. Anderson, RPSGT. “Thirteen percent of the U.S. adult population is afflicted with it.”
Anderson also contends that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted sleep apnea testing. “Although HSAT devices have been available to patients for years, the pandemic has emphasized the need to innovate,” he writes. “A new category of fully disposable HSAT devices is now changing the landscape for both providers, payers, and patients alike. With the disposable models the user can now simply discard the entire device after receiving almost-immediate results. But this newfound agility comes with some costs: they are more expensive per use, on-board-device memory is not included so the device has to be connected to a smartphone, limited clinical acceptance, and the environmental impact of disposing the plastics and other materials is a concern. For now, no universal answer is available for whether fully disposable home sleep tests are effective during the pandemic.”
