The Effect of Cpap Treatment on Sleep Fragmentation

Traditional therapy for obstructive sleep apnea includes nightly use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) and it has been the most common form of therapy for sleep apnea since 1981. In this study, we aimed to show that sleep stage percentage alteration is an indication of the severity of the disease and, impairment of the sleep stage percentage can be restored by CPAP treatment.
In our sleep laboratory we evaluated 63 obstructive sleep apnea patients, 14 women and 49 men, during a one-year period. Of these patients the youngest was 15 and the oldest was 71 years old and the mean of age was 44. Of these 33 had Respiratory Disturbance Index (RDI) greater than 20 and were administered CPAP therapy.
We compared some sleep parameters of these patients with and without CPAP treatment. These sleep parameters were: sleep stage percentage alteration, obstructive apnea count, the longest apnea duration, mean apnea duration and RDI. We found that obstructive apnea count is 133.06 before CPAP treatment and 26.43 with CPAP treatment. The longest apnea duration was measured as 64.87 seconds before CPAP treatment and 30.20 seconds with CPAP treatment. We measured the mean apnea duration as 19.83 seconds before CPAP treatment and 17.76 seconds with CPAP treatment. We also measured the RDI as 55.65 before CPAP and 16.04 with CPAP treatment.
According to our data, CPAP treatment corrects REM sleep percentage effectively although it does not correct completely. Our data also shows that obstructive apnea count and its reflection, RDI, were reduced significantly by CPAP treatment. In summary, our data confirm that CPAP therapy is effective in obstructive apnea patients by means of RDI reduction and sleep stage percentage correction.