What are the ASA Sleep Apnea Guidelines

Posted By EightNine On 24th April 2011

Sleep apnea can have a pretty big impact on your life, in particular on your health. One of the problems is that it puts you at risk any time that you need anesthesia. This is obviously because the anesthesia will put you to sleep. It is important that your doctor know if you have sleep apnea before surgery so that they can adjust the way that they manage your airway accordingly. To this end the ASA sleep apnea guidelines were created.

There are a lot of health risks that come with having sleep apnea, one of the biggest is the risks that occur in the event that you need surgery. The main issue is the anesthesia, which of course puts you to sleep. During this period you are at risk of problems with your breathing that can be worse than the normal ones that you have when you are sleeping at home. Therefore the ASA sleep apnea guidelines were created to help doctors to deal with this risk. The American Society of Anesthesiologists recommends that these guidelines be followed anytime a patient with sleep apnea requires surgery.

The biggest issue with the ASA sleep apnea guidelines is in determining whether or not you have sleep apnea. This can be a challenge since the only way to get a sure diagnosis is with a sleep study. However it is not practical to do this prior to every surgery. Therefore the anesthesiologist is largely going to have to follow the guidelines that are used by all other doctors to determine whether or not you have apnea. This will consist largely of a questionnaire and a physical examination. The questions will be mainly about how you sleep and the exam will look for obvious warning signs.

While the ASA sleep apnea guidelines can be a useful way of screening out the people who obviously don’t have the condition there is still going to be a lot of gray area. That means that in large part the anesthesiologist is going to have to proceed as if you do have sleep apnea unless he can be sure that you don’t. The other issue is people who require emergency surgery, in this case there won’t be time for a  sleep apnea screening. In these situations it will be necessary to work on the assumption that the patient has moderate to severe sleep apnea.

The ASA sleep apnea guidelines also cover the way that the anesthesiologist should deal with patients who do have the condition. In large part there is no need to concern yourself with this. The guidelines deal mainly with the way that they manage your airway and the medications that they use. The main thing from the patients point of view is to make sure that the anesthesiologist knows that you have sleep apnea. If you have any symptoms make sure that you bring these up before the surgery, it will help to make sure that things run smoothly.

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