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What keeps you up at night?

Obstructive sleep apnea. Narcolepsy. REM behavior disorder. Restless legs syndrome. Sleep onset insomnia. Even snoring.

What should you do about it? Count sheep. Drink warm milk. Avoid certain foods. There are a lot of remedies for getting you to the land of nod.

Helping people sleep.

We all have sleepless nights occasionally. But for some, it’s more than a nuisance. It’s a diagnosed sleep disorder. The National Sleep Foundation estimates 10 to 15 percent of people in the U.S. are diagnosed with sleep disorders.

Experts say lack of shut-eye affects you the same as drinking three shots of whiskey. Sleep disruptions impair your productivity on the job, make you a danger behind the wheel, contribute to memory loss and increase your risk for heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and obesity.

We’ve expanded our sleep disorder treatment system, allowing us to improve treatment for our patients with sleep disorders.

Sleep data download.

We’ve upgraded our sleep software to Natus SleepWorks at Houston Methodist Hospital and Houston Methodist San Jacinto. This new sleep disorder treatment application makes it easier to help our patients with sleep disorders.

It provides faster turnaround time to generate your sleep data, meaning physicians can interpret your sleep study results and prescribe treatment for your specific condition – sooner than they could before.

“This application makes it easy to gather all the sleep information needed for a diagnosis, and it streamlines the analysis,” said Michael Shimp, Director, IT Clinical Systems. “It also makes it easier for clinicians to filter sleep studies by date, diagnosis and health status, as well as track trends over time.”

The technology of sleep.

A lot happens during a sleep study. As you spend the night in one of our Houston Methodist sleep labs, clinicians and technicians use technology to measure your sleep cycles and stages.

They do this by recording brain waves, electrical activity of muscles, leg movements, eye movement, breathing rate, airflow and respiratory movements, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation and heart rhythm. Each sleep study also includes continuous video and audio recordings of you during the night.

“This overnight data feed gives clinicians the information they need to identify your specific sleep disorder and prescribe a treatment plan,” Shimp said.

What this technology expansion means for you – quicker interpretation of your symptoms and a rest-assured plan for putting you to sleep.