Are you silently suffocating at night?
Close to a billion adults worldwide are estimated to have obstructive sleep apnea, and most of them do not know (Benjafield AV, et al. Lancet Respir Med. 2019). This walks you through the risk factors and the daytime effects, and tells you plainly whether they are worth taking to a doctor.
Why this matters
Obstructive sleep apnea silently interrupts breathing dozens or hundreds of times per night. Untreated it raises risk of heart attack, stroke, diabetes, dementia, and car accidents by 2-4×. 80% of sufferers do not know they have it. This checklist takes 2 minutes. It is our own list of the risk factors most often reported alongside sleep apnea, not the questionnaire a clinic uses.
01
Ten risk factors
The features most consistently associated with sleep apnea in published research, each with a plain explanation of why it is on the list.
02
Five daytime effects
What the nights are actually costing you, starting with the one that matters most: drowsiness at the wheel.
This is a risk-factor checklist written by us, not a validated screening instrument, and it cannot tell you whether you have sleep apnea. The factors it asks about are those repeatedly associated with obstructive sleep apnea in the published literature. A diagnosis requires a sleep study — a home test or polysomnography — ordered by a clinician.