CPAP News Letter - Issue: 6

Our newsletter is designed to provide information regarding state-of-the art equipment and the latest techniques to treat sleep apnea. We hope it is interesting and helpful to you as you work to optimize your apnea treatment.

Okay CPAPer's, need a bit of an ego boost? Well, many young NFL football heroes have sleep apnea. Sleep studies were done on 300 players from eight randomly selected teams. Sleep apnea was found in 14% of these athletes, and was found in a whopping 34% in the lineman group. It is estimated that 4% of adult men and 2% of women have sleep apnea. Simply put, large people have a greater chance of developing sleep apnea, even if they are in great shape. For more information go to http://www.sleepfoundation.org/football.html

The Innomed Nasal Aire interface system will soon have a serious competitor. Viasys is marketing a system called the Spiritus. Some web-sites are selling a version of these now. We do not consider this version of the Spiritus ready for use. Some tubing connections will not stay together for more than minutes. The soon to be released version will stay together and provide some other improvements. Now that Innomed has some competition, expect that the nasal prong systems will improve rapidly. These systems are still in the early stages of development and have great potential. We should have the improved version of the Spiritus by the end of the month. For more information and a picture go to http://www.viasyshealthcare.com/Products/Spiritus/Spiritus.asp

The new extremely small and lightweight Puritan Bennett Goodnight 420S CPAP is exceeding customer expectations. It is just amazing how small, light and quiet these units are. They are one quarter the size of some popular machines. Recent CPAP news has included acceptance of heated humidification as a standard of care, the availability of nasal prong systems, a CPAP that makes breathing much easier, and now a CPAP that is easy to travel with. The CPAPs of the future will no doubt combine many of these break through features.

More on the 420 CPAP: The S version of this machine can be downloaded and will display details on apnea, hypopnia, and snoring events. This was something that only auto CPAPs and the Resmed S7 Elite could do. If you are a computer nerd or are really interested in knowing more about you sleep quality, you now have another option.

We have added a "Mask Comparison Guide" to our web sites. We are not aware that anyone has published anything like it for CPAP masks. It answers the question, "what masks are comparable in size to another?" It can be difficult to upgrade to the newest masks. A medium in one model mask is often not equivalent to a medium of another model, often even within the same manufacturer's offerings. There have been no serious attempt for the manufactures to create a standard they all follow. So what masks have the size and quality characteristics needed to replace a given mask? Our "Mask Comparison Guide" makes specific recommendations for ninety eight masks . We intend to keep it up to date as new products are released and evaluated. We hope it is helpful. You can see more on how we developed this, and the considerations that went into it at http://www.cpap.com/maskguideExplain.shtml

As always, if you have any questions or comments, we welcome your calls or email.

Sincerely,

John Goodman
cpap.com