This often undiagnosed condition, where patients frequently stop breathing, for a few seconds, during periods of sleep, has a significant impact on the patient's quality of life and is a proven risk factor for hypertension, heart disease and stroke.
CLINICAL CONTEXT
Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is now recognised to be an independent risk factor for daytime hypertension. Much data suggest that OSA is a cardiovascular disease risk factor for stroke, coronary artery disease or heart failure. A prevalence of 4% has been reported in the general population. The prevalence raises to much higher level in patients with cardiovascular diseases (50% in patients with hypertension, 30% in patients with Acute coronary syndromes, 60% in patient with stroke).
Nevertheless, most of individuals with OSA are asymptomatic for their apnea and remain undiagnosed, presenting instead hypertension, arrhythmia or congestive heart failure.
Polysomnography is the gold standard diagnostic tool for assessing sleep-disordered breathing. It requires an overnight stay in a sleep laboratory but several months waiting list are commonly observed to have access to this procedure.
HolterSoft Ultima is a simple and effective software allowing for the first time the cardiologists to massively screen their patients for OSA. NOVACOR's ground breaking solution is based on a single index (% VLFI) derived from a simple ECG Holter procedure.
%VLFI is derived from the analysis of the RR variability and thus quantifies the abnormal parasympathetic and sympathetic regulations associated to each apneic event.
The efficiency of the %VLFI and the interest in clinical routine have been established by several scientific publications.