Sleep Medicine

If you have sleep apnea, insomnia or other sleep challenges that affect your quality of life, turn to experts at the Sleep Center at UC San Diego Health for expert diagnosis and treatment.

Proper sleep is an essential part of overall health. Our specialists provide a range of services to treat sleep disorders and improve your health and quality of life.

Diagnosis and Treatment of Sleep Disorders

Insufficient or poor quality of sleep can lead to health problems. We provide a full spectrum of advanced diagnostic and therapeutic services for people with sleep-related disorders.

Diagnosis

• Sleep studies: These tests measure specific sleep aspects to help diagnose sleep disorders. They can be done overnight at our clinic or at your home with remote monitoring. The goal is to record brain and body activity that happens during sleep.
• Multiple sleep latency test (MSLT): This full-day sleep study measures excessive daytime sleepiness. It's one of the most important tools we use to diagnose narcolepsy. The MSLT involves several naps (usually every two hours) over the course of one day.
• Maintenance of Wakefulness Test (MWT): This test assesses a patient's ability to stay awake during the day.

Treatments

• Upper airway stimulation therapy: The FDA-approved Inspire implantable device can help treat people with obstructive sleep apnea.
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I): CBT-I is the main therapy for insomnia disorders and is preferred over medications as a first step. It targets certain cognitive and behavioral factors that can disrupt your sleep. Therapy sessions are offered by sleep psychologists at our center.

Sleep Apnea and Weight Loss

Patients with sleep apnea can often improve their condition by losing weight. We provide referrals and pre-operative evaluation for bariatric (weight loss) surgery.

Our Sleep Medicine Team

At UC San Diego Health, sleep disorders are managed by a multidisciplinary team of experts led by Bernie Sunwoo, MD. This includes specialists in sleep medicine, behavioral health services, and head and neck surgery (ENT).

Our sleep medicine team includes doctors who are board-certified in their specialty as well as nurse practitioners. They use leading-edge technology to collect precise information about a person's sleep movements, behaviors, and breathing patterns. These details help us identify even minor sleep abnormalities.