Abstract:
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a debilitating sleep disorder that, when left untreated, causes a myriad of health, safety, and financial problems. Effective treatments for this disorder exist; the largest barrier to treatment is currently diagnosis. The DSM-5 requires polysomnography, an expensive and time-consuming measure, for diagnosis. Research indicates that up to 93% of women and 82% of men with moderate to severe sleep apnea remain undiagnosed (Young, Evans, Finn, & Palta, 1997). Questionnaires are frequently used as screening tools to identify individuals at risk for OSA, but few have both high sensitivity and specificity. Spoormaker and colleagues (2005) developed the SLEEP-50 questionnaire to assess symptoms of various sleep disorders; they found the sleep apnea subscale to have both high specificity (.88) and sensitivity (.85). The current research tested the psychometric properties of the SLEEP-50 sleep apnea subscale in a sample of 300 sleep center patients and found lower specificity (.64) and sensitivity (.56) than Spoormaker (2005).
