Early-morning headaches, daytime fatigue and poor sleep are all common symptoms felt by both visitors and locals in Summit County, but what does this mean for overall health? The team at Ebert Family Clinic in Frisco decided to launch a sleep study, with the help of the Frisco location of the Colorado Sleep Institute, to find out.
The purpose of the nine-month project was to evaluate people’s oxygen levels when sleeping at night. Leading the charge from the clinic was family nurse practitioner Tara Taylor, who said the team’s hypothesis was that those sleeping at higher elevations get slightly less oxygen than those at lower elevations.
Taylor said the study targeted healthy individuals and they excluded those who had “anything that would interrupt sleep or alter our desire for a baseline of healthy, normal patients.” Depending on the results, Taylor said the study could — and did — show evidence of a new baseline for what could be expected oxygen levels at higher elevations.
For example, at lower elevations, healthy individuals usually have a 90% basal oxygen level, but healthy individuals in the study showed to be spending more time asleep below the range, usually at 88% or 89%.
“Most patients typically should be above 90% both awake and asleep,” Taylor explained. “So if you were in the hospital in Denver, you’d be sleeping 92%. If you were 88%, they would put you on a liter or two of oxygen. They would treat that number. So our goal is to say, ‘We’re at such high altitudes here, is this the baseline? Should we be looking for patients to be greater than 90%?’”
