CleveMed Blogs

CleveMed announces Sharma Penix as the winner of the post-Sleep 2010 SleepView Raffle! Sharma, from Dayton Ohio, is a Sleep Technician at the SouthView Sleep Disorder Center with the Kettering Health Network. Sharma will receive a SleepView Home Sleep Monitor, along with the Crystal PSG software for reviewing, scoring and creating sleep reports.

CleveMed wishes to thank every one who submitted entries for the SleepView Raffle! We appreciate your interest in the SleepView, and welcome your requests for more information.

About SleepView: It’s the smallest and lightest home sleep monitor with AASM recommended Type 3 channel set- and, ergonomically designed for patients to perform a self test for obstructive sleep apnea, right at home.

For the fourth consecutive year, CleveMed recently received a Leading Edge Award from Entrepreneurs EDGE, which recognizes the Northeast Ohio Mid-Market Companies that create great value for themselves and for their community.

To qualify for the Leading Edge Award the companies had to have sales revenue up to $750 million and must currently sell some of their goods or services outside the region, or have plans to do so. Factors that were also taken into consideration were: the company’s self-reported EBIT and total taxable compensation for all employees working in Northeast Ohio. EDGE looks at the absolute figure as well as the growth rate of this figure over the past three years.

CleveMed was recognized for the accomplishment at an awards dinner held on May 19th at the InterContinental Hotel in Cleveland.

The CleveMed Sleep Team just returned from Sleep 2010 in San Antonio, TX (If you visited booth #1029, thanks for stopping by!)

All of CleveMed’s wireless, portable sleep systems were featured at our booth, but this year the spotlight fell on the new baby among CleveMed’s family of sleep monitoring devices. SleepView is the smallest, lightest home sleep monitor following AASM guidelines for portable monitoring, and ergonomically designed for patients to perform a self test at home. Due to the overwhelming response the SleepView home sleep monitor received, CleveMed will be giving away a SleepView in a post-Sleep 2010 raffle.

The other CleveMed sleep systems featured at Sleep 2010 were Sapphire PSG, SleepScout, DreamPort & Crystal Monitor PSG Series.

PS: Cell phone pics from San Antonio TX in CleveMed Sleep Facebook page: Click here!

For most of us, when we think of carbon dioxide (CO2), we think of words like waste, danger, toxic, poison; but in reality CO₂ is not only a natural part of our existence but an essential one. We know we need to breathe oxygen to live. So many of us naturally assume that when we hold our breath, that it is the lack of oxygen that our body is reacting to and forcing us to breathe again. . . wrong. In reality, it is the accumulation of CO₂ that our body is reacting to and forcing us to breathe again, trying to reduce and remove the CO₂ from our lungs (You say: Ah ha, see, CO₂ is bad! Our body is fighting to get rid of it). Well, yes, too much of anything is a bad thing, even oxygen (Oxygen toxicity or oxygen poisoning, causes disorientation, breathing problems, and even seizures, but that’s not the point of this article). Back to CO₂, the needed concentrations of carbon dioxide we are talking about are well below the toxic levels, and most importantly without CO₂, you don’t have as much drive to breathe.

There are tens of millions of people with sleep apnea (that is, the failure to breathe while you sleep). Sleep apnea is typically further broken down into obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), where by the patient is trying to breath but air can’t get in due to an obstruction or collapse in the airway, and central sleep apnea (CSA), where by the patient just stops trying to breathe for short periods of time. The most prominent and successful treatment of OSA is using a constant positive airway pressure (CPAP) device or a variation there of. However some of these OSA patients do not get better, do not tolerate the CPAP, or even get worse. One reason is that a portion of the OSA population actually has a complex sleep apnea (CSA) condition that is masked by the OSA. In these cases the CPAP will prevent the obstructions, but then it becomes apparent that the patient is exhibiting CSA characteristics as well. The complex sleep apnea symptoms are unmasked or amplified because of a lack of respiratory drive due to insufficient levels of CO₂. Normally when we sleep, our CO₂ levels increase just slightly. Think about it, you are sleeping in a relatively stationary position creating a slight cloud of CO₂ around you. A CPAP device, however, reverses that effect since it is drawing air from an area a few feet away and pumping it into your airway. To add to that, the increased pressure and flow also acts to ‘blow off’ more of the CO₂ that is normally inside your lungs, so it is very conceivable that the CO₂ levels on CPAP can be even lower than normal (as opposed to slightly elevated in normal sleep). So this complex sleep apnea (CSA) population would appear to have a CO₂ ‘critical threshold’ right at that point between the CO₂ levels experienced with and without CPAP. There are multiple studies that have now shown that adding just a small amount of CO₂ actually treats these patients.

So yes, these patients do say, “give me CO₂ or give me bad sleep!”