Patent ID: 7252640

Claim:
A method for detecting sleep-disordered breathing of a patient, comprising: detecting a respiration pattern of one or more respiration cycles; determining characteristics of the respiration pattern, comprising: determining one or more breath intervals and one or more tidal volume measurements of the one or more respiration cycles; identifying an ongoing disordered breathing event as one or both of an apnea event and a hypopnea event based on comparison of the breath intervals to a breath interval threshold or the tidal volume measurements to a tidal volume threshold; and determining a duration of the ongoing disordered breathing event; and if the ongoing disordered breathing duration exceeds an event duration threshold, discriminating between apnea, hypopnea and mixed apnea and hypopnea based on the one or more characteristics of the respiration pattern, wherein at least one of detecting, determining and discriminating is performed at least in part implantably.