Hypoxic Burden and Sleepiness in Treated OSA Patients

The Maintenance of Wakefulness Test (MWT) is widely used to objectively assess sleepiness and make safety-related decisions and Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) is the most used scale used to assess subjective sleepiness in sleep medicine. Besides Obstructive Sleep Apnea measures are rapidly evolving and conventional measures such as apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) and oxygen desaturation index (ODI) are increasingly being supplemented by measures of hypoxia such as hypoxic burden. Residual AHI in treated OSA have limited predictive value for objective sleepiness. Therefore it seems particularly relevant to identify other predictors of both subjective and objective sleepiness. This study aims at studying the influence of hypoxic burden as measure of both subjective or objective sleepiness. We hypothesize that impaired nocturnal oxygenation might influence brain functioning during wakefulness and result in sleepiness as assessed by ESS and MWT.