How do sleep studies provide useful data when they’re taking you out of your normal routine to a strange place, bed, and hooked up to things?

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Wouldn’t you be basically guaranteed to sleep poorly?

I know just being in a hotel I wake up and flop around all night. Being observed and tested seems telling me that would just make it worse.

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

My kid has had a bunch of sleep studies over the last 12 years, and I have asked almost this exact question to a couple sleep doctors/techs before. The general consensus I’ve gotten was that they do the sleep study just to see if they can catch the problem. They know people aren’t going to get great sleep, and they know that many sleep problems don’t happen every night. So they order the test fully aware that it might not pick up on the problem.

They use the data they get from the test WITH your observations and other symptoms. A good sleep doctor won’t completely discount a problem just because they didn’t see it during the sleep study.

My daughter sleep walks, but not every night. She had a sleep study recently to see if there was any obvious reason for her to do this. She didn’t sleep walk during the study, but the doctor still knows that she does sleep walk based on our observations at home. She also has sleep apnea, and they were able to tell (with a decent level of certainty) that the apnea is likely not causing the sleep walking.

Tl:Dr they know you’re not going to sleep well, and they know they might not catch everything. The test is just one piece of the puzzle in sleep medicine.

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