ASAA updates main web site and forum
The American Sleep Apnea Association unveiled a new, highly interactive web site designed to maintain its position as the nation’s most comprehensive, user- friendly, and patient-oriented source of information about sleep, sleep apnea, and other sleep disorders.
The web site is located at the easily remembered URL http://sleepapnea.org.
Concurrently the ASAA announced a major updating of a related site, http://www.apneasupport.org , which hosts the Apnea Support Forum. The forum attracts a broad array of sleep apnea patients and care givers who engage in wide-ranging discussions of how to live with sleep apnea. The two sites are extensively interlinked.
The web site launches were announced by Edward Grandi, executive director of the American Sleep Apnea Association. “We are delighted to be able to offer this new tool to the public, especially those members of the public who suffer from sleep apnea and their families,” Grandi said.
Sleep apnea is a life-limiting and life-shortening disease that’s estimated to affect 22 million Americans. Most of them don’t know it. Left untreated, sleep apnea leads to chronic daytime sleepiness that may result in catastrophic accidents in the operation of automobiles and other heavy machinery In the longer term, sleep apnea can lead to morbid obesity, heart disease and stroke, diabetes, and other diseases.
While sleep professionals—physicians, dentists, and other experts—actively participate in the leadership of the ASAA, the association’s primary focus is on patients and patient advocates and their needs. By long-standing policy, a majority of the ASAA’s governing board are patients and their advocates, one of whom chairs the body.
The new ASAA web site will be key element in furthering the association’s patient-centered mission. It is an educational and advocacy tool that in written and visual form provides dozens of items illuminating and explaining the world of sleep and sleep disorders.
It tells site users things they didn’t know.
It points them to sources of help they may need.
It includes a portal to the ASAA’s Sleep Apnea Forum, where patients help each other on a daily basis.
If offers a directory of the ASAA A.W.A.K.E. Network, a band of patient groups across the country that meet regularly to share information and encourage one another to persist in complying with the therapeutic regimen prescribed for them. In most cases, this involves the regular use of a positive airway pressure device while they sleep.
Finally, beyond laying out the association’s extensive treasury of in-house information, the site provides what may the be largest compilation available anywhere of links to external sites involved in sleep, sleep disorders, and sleep medicine.
“The American Sleep Apnea Association is a nonprofit charitable organization committed to providing balanced information about sleep and its disorders,” executive director Grandi said. “Where there are disagreements in the field, we offer all sides of the issue and leave it to patients to decide what’s best for them in consultation with their own health care professionals.”