Study aims to make sleep disorder diagnosis easier

Diagnosing sleep disorders such as sleep apnoea in regional centres like Geraldton may soon become easier as a study investigating the role played by a person’s face, neck and head in such disorders begins this month.

The area of sleep medicine has existed for almost 30 years, but the ability to test, measure and diagnose a patient has largely been confined to major cities because of the need for sleep laboratories and up-to-date equipment.

While diagnosing conditions like sleep apnoea has become easier for regional doctors’ thanks to advances in technology, testing can still be expensive, hard to access and lengthy.

Diagnosing a Geraldton patient involves applying for and conducting a home sleep study with a local pharmacy or the Geraldton Hospital.

The results are sent to a sleep scientist to analyse, then to a sleep physician to diagnose the patient.

Melbourne-based Dr Peter Silon, a sleep physician responsible for the diagnosis of many Geraldton patients, said with an average of 10 people diagnosed with sleep apnoea in Geraldton per month, there was a need for regional areas to have greater testing resources.

“Geraldton being a four-hour drive from Perth has kind of been neglected a bit because most specialists, like myself, prefer to sit in a cosy office,” he said. “Groups like mine have been working with pharmacies in regional centres that don’t have access to a specialist or sleep laboratories, to help these communities diagnose these sleep disorders.”

Sleep disorders affect an estimated 1.5 million Australians, costing the health system $5.1 billion each year.

Diagnosis may soon be as simple as examining a 3-D photograph, as the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Sleep Science Professor Peter Eastwood and the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering’s Ajmal Mian begin their study.

They will use a dense correspondence technique — a shape analysis system which maps anatomical points on the human face — to investigate the role played by the structure of a person’s face, neck and head in sleep disorders.

Professor Eastwood said sleep apnoea, associated with snoring and repeated periods of choking during sleep, was a common cause of poor sleep, with most sufferers undiagnosed.

“This is mainly because the current methods of assessing sleep apnoea are expensive and access to them is limited,” he said.

“We hope that our findings may mean that one day we are able to diagnose this debilitating disorder which causes daytime sleepiness and is strongly linked to sleepiness-related accidents, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and depression through analysing a simple photograph.”

However, Dr Silon said he did not think this diagnosis would be available any time soon.

“I’d love to look at someone for two minutes and tell them whether they’ve got problems, but that’s 100 off in my judgment,” he said.

“There’s too much human variability I think.

“As long as we have a relatively well-funded health care system where a person can get testing, that’s the standard for the moment.”