OBSTRUCTIVE SLEEP APNEA AND OFFICE-BASED SURGERY

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a recognized risk factor for complications during anesthesia during both the intraoperative and the postoperative periods. Unfortunately, only a small subset of patients who have OSA are formally diagnosed with the condition. There are many reasons, maybe chief among them being that the gold standard for testing is overnight polysomnography, which is expensive and inconvenient. The apnea-hypopnea index (AHI; number of apneas >10 seconds and hypopneas per hour) is frequently used to assess the severity of OSA. An AHI value ≥ 30 events/h reflects severe OSA. Moderate OSA is defined by the AHI as ranging between 15 and 29.99 events/h and mild OSA between 5 and 14.99 events/h. Although home-based monitoring is available, its reliability has not been clearly validated and the cost is high