OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of early use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy to treat or prevent acute atelectasis in post-operative cardiac patients particularly smokers and elderly patients. METHODS A pilot study suggested enrolling at least 32 participants in each group to be significant. One hundred and eight patients from King Fahd Armed Forces Hospital, Jeddah, King...

1593 Apnea Positive Pressure Long-term Efficacy Study—Kushida et al INTRODUCTION Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep-related breathing disorder estimated to affect more than 14 million Americans1; comprehensive data are lacking on the impact of OSA on the neurocognitive domains of attention and psychomotor function, learning and memory, and executive and frontal-lobe function. Conti...

AIM We hypothesised that short-term application of bi-level nasal continuous positive airway pressure CPAP (SiPAP) compared with conventional nasal CPAP (nCPAP) at the same mean airway pressure in infants with persistent oxygen need recovering from respiratory distress syndrome would improve CO2 removal with no change in oxygen requirement. DESIGN Non-blinded, randomised, observational four-p...

BACKGROUND Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) maintains a constant pressure to reduce the patient's work of breathing (WOB). The aim of this study was to measure the additional WOB imposed by four current CPAP devices during simulation of a difficult but commonly encountered clinical situation. METHOD Flow contour, respiratory system compliance and total lung-airway resistance of a pa...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown that changes in lung volume influence upper airway size and resistance, particularly in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), and that continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) requirements decrease when the lung volume is increased. We sought to determine the effect of a constant lung volume increase on sleep disordered breathing during non-REM s...

Background: Previous studies have shown that changes in lung volume influence upper airway size and resistance, particularly in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), and that continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) requirements decrease when the lung volume is increased. We sought to determine the effect of a constant lung volume increase on sleep disordered breathing during non-REM ...

Noninvasive positive pressure ventilation evolved over several decades because of the need to avoid the complications of intubation when respiratory support became necessary. The most useful modalities have been continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) and biphasic positive airway pressure (BiPAP). The former supports respiration by presenting the airway with a constant pressure on inspiratio...

Patients with chronic congestive cardiac failure (CCF) frequently suffer from central sleep apnoea syndrome (CSAS). Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) has been suggested as a treatment. The authors hypothesised that bilevel ventilation might be easier to initiate and superior to CPAP at correcting the sleep-related abnormality of breathing in patients with CCF. After excluding those wit...

The difference between mean inspiratory and expiratory respiratory reactance (delta(rs)) measured with forced oscillation technique (FOT) at 5 Hz allows the detection of expiratory flow limitation (EFL) in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients breathing spontaneously. This aim of this study was to evaluate whether this approach can be applied to COPD patients during noninvasive ...

Sleep apnoea is associated with increased cardiovascular risk. Sleep apnoea is common after stroke and associated with increased blood pressure variability as described by Turkington and co-workers in this issue of Clinical Science. Both sleep apnoea and blood pressure variability confer a poor prognosis after stroke and are potentially treatable. Many studies of CPAP (continuous positive airwa...