Lung Center opens sleep lab
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) has long since been recognized to have serious consequences on health such as vehicular accidents, 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 OSA.
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 in the country.
Staff from the Lung Center have been specially trained to take care of patients being treated for different sleeping disorders in children and adults. 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 staff are certified registered polysomnographic technologists by the AASM, and certified respiratory therapists who have been performing sleep studies since the Lung Center first opened in 2004. The Lung Center of the Philippines also has a sleep medicine fellowship program since 2013 accredited by the Philippine Society of Sleep Medicine.
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 American Academy of Sleep Medicine. 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.