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Sleep apnea risk check

Obstructive sleep apnea is thought to go undiagnosed in most of the people who have it, largely because the symptoms happen while you are asleep. This is a short checklist of the things that genuinely raise the odds, scored into plain English with a next step. It runs in your browser, and your answers are never sent anywhere.

Do you snore?

1.Do you snore?

Loud enough to be heard through a closed door, or to bother someone sharing the room.

Has anyone seen you stop breathing, gasp or choke while asleep?

2.Has anyone seen you stop breathing, gasp or choke while asleep?

Or you wake yourself up gasping, choking or short of breath.

Are you tired or sleepy during the day, even after enough hours in bed?

3.Are you tired or sleepy during the day, even after enough hours in bed?

Not "could do with a coffee", but fighting to stay awake reading, watching TV or in a meeting.

Do you have high blood pressure, or take medication for it?

4.Do you have high blood pressure, or take medication for it?

How old are you?

5.How old are you?

What was your sex at birth?

6.What was your sex at birth?

Obstructive sleep apnea is roughly two to three times as common in men, so it changes the reading.

Height, weight and neck size

7.How tall are you, and what do you weigh?

Used to work out BMI, which is the single strongest body-related risk factor. The numbers stay in this tab.

Do you own a recording pulse oximeter?

8.Do you have a pulse oximeter that records overnight?

Not scored. It only changes what we suggest you do next.

What the questions are asking about

None of these are arbitrary. Each one is a factor with a well-established association with obstructive sleep apnea in the sleep-medicine literature, and they are weighted here by roughly how much each one shifts the odds.

Witnessed breathing pauses
The heaviest single item, and the only one that lifts the result on its own. Snoring is common in people without apnea, but a partner watching you stop breathing and restart with a gasp is a description of an apneic event.
Snoring
Counts for less than people expect. Almost everyone with obstructive apnea snores, but so do enormous numbers of people who do not have it, so snoring on its own moves the odds very little. It matters in combination.
Daytime sleepiness
Not tiredness, but sleepiness: fighting to stay awake through things you are not choosing to sleep through. It is what repeated overnight arousals cost you, and it is the symptom treatment most reliably fixes.
High blood pressure
The relationship runs both ways. Untreated apnea raises blood pressure, and apnea is markedly more common in people with hypertension, especially where it resists medication.
BMI and neck circumference
The strongest body-related factor. Soft tissue around the upper airway makes collapse during sleep more likely, and neck circumference tracks that more directly than weight alone. Plenty of people with apnea are not overweight, which is why nothing here treats a normal BMI as reassurance on its own.
Age and sex
Prevalence rises with age and is roughly two to three times higher in men. In women the gap narrows considerably after menopause, which is why the checklist asks.

Why this is not STOP-BANG

If you have met a sleep apnea screener before it was probably STOP-BANG, the Berlin Questionnaire or the Epworth Sleepiness Scale. All three are copyrighted instruments with licence terms that do not permit their use in a commercial product, so you will not find them reproduced here, and you should be sceptical of free sites that do reproduce them. The underlying risk factors are published science and anyone can use them. The wording, the weights and the bands on this page are our own.

The honest consequence is that this checklist has no validation study behind it and no published sensitivity or specificity. It sorts you into “probably not worth chasing”, “worth a conversation” and “worth a conversation soon”. Treat it as a prompt, not as a test result. If your doctor wants a scored instrument, they will use a licensed one.

What a questionnaire cannot do

Every question above asks what you or someone else has noticed. That leaves out everyone who sleeps alone, everyone whose events cluster in the part of the night nobody is awake for, and everyone whose apnea has not yet produced symptoms they would describe as a problem. It is a reasonable filter and a poor measurement.

An overnight recording is the cheapest way to replace noticing with measuring. A recording pulse oximeter logs blood oxygen and pulse all night, and our free session viewer turns one night of that into a desaturation index, the share of the night spent below 90%, and whether your heart rate shows the cyclical rise and fall that goes with obstructive events. It also prints to a single page you can take to an appointment. That is still not a diagnosis, but it is evidence rather than impression, and it is a far more productive thing to put in front of a doctor than “I think I might snore”.

What happens if you do see a doctor

Usually a short conversation, a licensed screening questionnaire, and if that points the same way, a sleep study. Increasingly that means a home sleep apnea test rather than a night in a lab: a kit you take home that records airflow, breathing effort, oxygen and pulse. The number that comes back is the apnea-hypopnea index, or AHI, and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine bands it as mild from 5, moderate from 15 and severe from 30 events per hour. An oximeter cannot produce an AHI, because it cannot see airflow or effort. It can show you the oxygen consequences, which is a good reason to record a night before the appointment rather than after it.