Autonomic nervous system response analysis in patients suffering from sleep apnea syndrome

Abstract

Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) is an underdiagnosed disease affecting up to 5% of the general population. It is a multifactorial disease characterized by repeated episodes of breathing pauses (apnea) or significant reduction in respiratory amplitude (hypopnea) during the patient sleep. that may cause sleep fragmentation along with acute cardio-respiratory alterations associated with the development of hypertension and cardiovascular diseases in the long-term. In previous works, it has been proposed a novel monitoring and therapeutic system for SAS, based on non-invasive adaptive kinaesthetic. This study presents preliminary results of the patient’s physiological response in terms of pulse photoplethysmography (PPG) amplitude and pulse transit time (PTT). It has been proposed a chain of signal processing that has allowed to characterize the pulse photoplethysmography in order to estimate an autonomic response to respiratory events when the therapy is active or not. Although beneficial results have been observed on 20% of treated patients, these preliminary results do not allow us to determine in a global way the potential effect of the therapy in terms of peripheral vasoconstriction control. New studies are currently under way to analyse other autonomic indicators in this population.