4 Topic Commentaries

Sleep Study Cutoffs May Guide Discharge

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  Christopher P. Bonafide, MD, MSCE

  Pediatrics; Hospital Medicine; Patient Safety

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  Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

  We all have a tendency to believe that continuous monitoring is something that is always going to provide benefit and safety, and unfortunately that isn’t the case, When you monitor patients unnecessarily, it creates risk not only for that patient, in terms of longer hospital stays and increased costs, but also for the entire unit due to the potential for alarm fatigue.

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  Robin Yang, MD, DDS

  Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery; Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery; Sleep Surgery

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  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  We do recommend that a formal sleep study, which is an in-house laboratory study where they bring you in overnight, you actually sleep in the lab, and they hook you up to monitors that test your brain waves as well as your heart rate and your oxygen saturation, as the gold standard of diagnosis.

  Source
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  Virend Somers, MD, PhD

  Cardiology; Sleep Medicine

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  Mayo Clinic

  What we found that is new with this study is that if you have sleep apnea, your risk of sudden death increases almost twofold, particularly if you stopped breathing more than 20 times per hour of sleep and if you had severe falls in oxygen saturation during sleep,

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  Michael J. Twery, PhD

  Sleep and Circadian Research

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  National Institutes of Health

  Anyone who feels so tired on a regular basis that this is a drag on their daytime function—that even if they allow enough time to get enough sleep on a regular basis and they still feel this way—then they need to discuss it with their doctor,

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