The use of oximetry and a questionnaire in primary care enables exclusion of a subsequent obstructive sleep apnea diagnosis.

Purpose: The study aims to prospectively validate the prognostic value of oximetry alone or combined in a two-step strategy with a questionnaire for the exclusion of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in primary care.

Methods: A total of 140 subjects with suspected OSA were included from 54 participating primary care practices. All subjects completed the Philips questionnaire and underwent one night of oximetry prior to referral to a sleep center.

Validation of the oxygen desaturation index in the diagnostic workup of obstructive sleep apnea.

Introduction: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is common, and diagnosis requires expensive and laborious testing to assess the apnea hypopnea index (AHI). We performed an analysis to explore the relationship between the oxygen desaturation index (ODI) as measured with pulse oximetry and the AHI in our large portable monitoring (PM) database to find an optimal cutoff value for the ODI in order to be able to exclude AHI ≥ 5 on PM.

Methods: Three thousand four hundred thirteen PM recordings were randomly divided into a training set (N = 2281) and a test set (N = 1132).