A study has confirmed that the STOP-Bang questionnaire was reliable in predicting obstructive sleep apnea in sleep clinic and surgical patients, as reported by Anesthesiology News.
Frances Chung, MBBS, professor of anesthesiology at the University Health Network, University of Toronto, Ontario, and the developer of the questionnaire (Figure), previously validated the instrument for surgical patients in 2008. She and her team strengthened that validation with a new meta-analysis.“Patients in the clinical setting may want to know their chances of having OSA based on their STOP-Bang score, so that’s what we were looking for here,” said Mahesh Nagappa, MD, a clinical fellow at Toronto Western Hospital, in Ontario, Canada. Diagnosing patients who may develop OSA is important given its increased risk for complications; polysomnography is accurate, but time-consuming and costly.
