Publications by authors named "K L Melehan"
Purpose: There is a paucity of data on preferences for obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) diagnostic tests during pregnancy. Simple test completion rates fail to capture patient preference or experience of completing sleep diagnostic tests. We assessed preference, ease of use, convenience, and the repeatability of level I, II and III sleep diagnostic tests, using questionnaires, in pregnant women in early to mid-gestation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Polysomnography (PSG) may be completed in the home environment (unattended), and when self-applied, allow the collection of data with minimal healthcare worker intervention. Self-applied, unattended PSG in the home environment using Somte PSG V2 (Somte) has not been validated in pregnant women in early to mid-gestation. We undertook a study to evaluate the accuracy of Somte compared to attended PSG.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of Apnealink Air (AL) as a less invasive alternative to polysomnography (PSG) for detecting obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) in pregnant women during early-mid gestation (≤ 24 weeks).
- A total of 49 pregnant participants were tested using both AL and PSG, with results indicating a high level of agreement between the two methods and finding that 29% of participants had OSA.
- The results showed that Apnealink Air outperformed traditional screening questionnaires and could effectively diagnose OSA using both manual and automatic scoring approaches.
Background: Mechanical insufflation-exsufflation (MI-E) is a cough augmentation technique used to support people with an ineffective cough. MI-E can be complex due to the number of different pressure, flow, and temporal setting adjustments needed to optimize cough efficacy. Many clinicians identify inadequate training, limited experience, and low confidence as barriers to MI-E use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objectives: There is an internal contradiction in current American Academy of Sleep Medicine standards for arousal index (AI) calculation in polysomnography: Arousals in sleep and wake epochs are counted, but only sleep time is used in the denominator. This study aimed to investigate the impact of including arousals scored in wake epochs on the AI.
Methods: We compared AIs including (AI) vs excluding (AI) awake-epoch arousals from 100 consecutive polysomnograms conducted for investigation of possible obstructive sleep apnea.