Epworth Sleepiness Scale

Okay

... a guy named, a sports psychologist named Ben Potenciano, where he gave a bunch of Major League Baseball players the Epworth Sleepiness Scale.

So for people who don't know, it's just eight items.

Yeah.

Sure.

And do you find validated instruments like the Epworth Sleepiness Scale to be clinically useful?

Yeah.

We use that quite frequently.

The Epworth Sleepiness Scale is not a diagnostic instrument for narcolepsy per se.

It's just a subjective scale that gives you a sense of how sleepy somebody is.

And so the scores range from zero to twenty-four.

On this test, a well-rested person typically takes more than fifteen minutes to fall asleep, while a severely sleep-deprived person may fall asleep in under five minutes.

Another tool used to measure subjective sleepiness is the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, a simple questionnaire that asks people to rate how likely they are to doze off in various everyday situations.

The Stanford Sleepiness Scale is an even simpler tool that asks a person to pick one statement from a list that best describes how alert or drowsy they feel right now.

Researchers have found that people are generally poor at judging their own level of sleepiness, especially when they are chronically sleep-deprived.

For subjective assessment, we use validated questionnaires.

The Epworth Sleepiness Scale, or ESS, measures trait sleepiness, how likely you are to doze off in specific situations like reading or watching TV.

And the other one is the ISI.

Yes.

and you're sleeping an okay amount, you probably need a referral anyway.

The set of questions that we use, and it's an imperfect set, is the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, which is a set of eight questions.

Developed in Australia, hence the Epworth name, and it is universally used to access sleep studies by GPs, for example.

You know, if you want a direct referral for a sleep study, you fill in the question around the risk of sleep apnea, you know, the stop bang or the OSA 50, and then determine whether you have symptoms that relate to that.

And there are scores that you can do in clinic to assess.

Firstly, for sleep apnea, there is something called a STOP-BANG score, and also the Epworth Sleepiness Score you can be used to look at daytime sleepiness, and then you can use the Fasset F score, which is a way of measuring fatigue.

And these should be considered on top of the typical scores that we use, namely BASDAI or SDAS.

And when we have a fuller appreciation of this, we may refer this patient to a sleep clinic for confirmation of sleep apnea, for they may benefit from other treatments and also for weight management services to be involved in this patient, psychological services for their low mood.