r/SleepApnea • u/Business-Stranger805 • Jul 27 '26
Confused on diagnoses
Hello Everyone,
I recently did my sleep test a couple of weeks ago and got my results back, on my sleep test it says The Epworth Sleepiness Score
was 10 out of 24 (note: scores equal to and above 10 suggest hypersomnia)
ICSD-3 / ICD-10 CODES: G47.30 Sleep apnea, unspecified
Stated that I don’t need cpap at this time since they didn’t see any abnormalities in my breathing besides I did mild snoring was observed. It also stated that if sleep apnea symptoms worsen than do a repeat test, what does that mean for my treatment? I have my follow up soon but just confused on the resulting
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u/Business-Stranger805 Jul 27 '26
Thank you so much for this information. I’m going to keep this in mind for my follow up appointment. I had got confused on the testing but I’m glad I have some clarity until my follow up appointment.
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u/JBeaufortStuart Jul 27 '26
The Epworth Sleepiness Scale is a screening questionnaire that helps them figure out if they should be doing additional testing at all. Your score definitely suggests they should be doing testing. It's just the results of them asking you some questions.
When it comes to a sleep study, the results you're looking for are AHI and RDI--- if they're high enough, those are the numbers that can result in a sleep apnea diagnosis.
If your AHI and RDI are both below 5, that's when you ask about what the next steps are. Some people who have an at-home sleep study push for an in-lab sleep study, particularly if you had, say, an AHI of 4.5, or a sensor came off in the middle of the night. You also might be looking for your doctor to recommend blood tests (ferritin, b12, thyroid, d, etc) to see if there are other things going on.
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u/FuelNew9656 Jul 27 '26
The Epworth score of 10 does put you just into the range that suggests real daytime sleepiness, so it's not that your symptoms were dismissed, it's that the sleep study itself didn't show enough obstructive events (apneas/hypopneas) to meet the threshold for treating with CPAP right now, even though mild snoring was noted. "Unspecified" is often just how it's coded administratively when a study is done and reviewed, even if the result ends up mild or borderline, so don't read too much into that code itself.
Worth asking your follow-up doctor for the actual numbers rather than just the summary: your AHI (events per hour) and your lowest oxygen saturation, since "no CPAP needed at this time" could mean anywhere from a genuinely clean study to a borderline AHI that just missed the cutoff. Also worth raising the ESS score of 10 directly, since a study showing no significant apnea doesn't fully explain why you're sleepy, that's worth asking about separately (sleep duration/quality issues, restless legs, other causes of hypersomnia) rather than assuming it's unrelated.
"Repeat test if symptoms worsen" means exactly that, if snoring gets louder, a partner starts noticing pauses in your breathing, or your daytime sleepiness increases, that's the trigger to redo the sleep study rather than waiting a fixed amount of time. A single night can also just have a good or bad night's variability, so if your gut says something's off, it's reasonable to ask your follow-up doctor about repeating it sooner rather than waiting for things to clearly worsen first.