Your symptoms may tell your doctor or dentist a lot about the quality of your sleep and the potential presence of sleep apnea. We can gain a great deal of insight by reviewing your symptoms, medical history, lifestyle, and anatomy. That said, a consultation and examination are not enough to reach an accurate diagnosis. Your healthcare provider must still perform some type of testing to confirm or rule out sleep apnea. 

A formal sleep study, called polysomnography, is the most accurate test for the diagnosis of sleep apnea. The most comprehensive data is obtained in a sleep study conducted in a lab. To have a lab-centered sleep study, you'd spend the night in a sleep lab. Nothing about your normal schedule would change, you simply won't sleep at home. Before you go to sleep, the staff will hook you up to multiple comfortable monitors, each of which will measure important vital signs related to snoring, breathing, level of oxygenation, and more. 

Another form of polysomnography that's available today, and quite common, is the home sleep study. A doctor or dentist can order a sleep study that you conduct on your own in the comfort of your home. Although the home sleep study can capture multiple forms of data that can indicate sleep apnea, there is no clinical oversight and fewer pieces of data are obtained overall. Still, many patients have received an accurate diagnosis from their home sleep study, leading to appropriate treatment.