Obstructive sleep apnea has long been recognized to have serious consequences on health such as vehicular accidents as well as increased risks for high blood pressure, heart failure, heart attack, and stroke. The high cost of sleep studies needed to confirm and plan treatment for OSA has been a stumbling block in providing relief to patients with the said condition.
In line with Lung Center of the Philippines’ mission of providing excellent service at the most affordable price, the hospital has launched its Sleep Laboratory using equipment from Philips Philippines for diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders.
The Sleep Lab has four specially designed hotel-grade rooms to provide patients the utmost comfort for overnight sleep studies, while being attended by pulmonary or sleep medicine Fellows under the supervision of a consultant sleep specialist.
Staff from the Lung Center has been specially trained to take care of patients, both children and adults, with different sleeping disorders. The sleep specialists are Fellows of the Philippine Society of Sleep Medicine and are certified by the World Association of Sleep Medicine and World Sleep Federation.
Among the hospital’s staff members are certified registered polysomnographic technologists by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and certified respiratory therapists who have been performing sleep studies since the Lung Center opened in 2004.
To assure the quality of the studies, Lung Center will use the latest video polysomnograph (Alice-6) in the country, which is a computerized sleep-wake and physiological monitoring system. It has a total of 55 channels and meets the polysomnographic specifications of the AASM.
The number of channels allows a complete EEG examination to investigate seizures, multiple sleep latency tests, as well as the usual diagnostic or titration studies. It also comes with a video acquisition system to document sleep parasomnias and seizure episodes.