Sleep Medicine and Surgery in Egypt: Evolution, Clinical Practice, Education and Research Services

All through Egyptian history, starting from the pharaohs, passing by the Coptic and Islamic eras up to modern Egypt, there have been different interests in healthy sleep and sleep hygiene. Myths about sleep medicine are common among cultures and in Egypt, lack of public awareness about sleep disorders makes most patients undiagnosed or ignorant about whom to consult about their symptoms. In this chapter, we aim to provide the reader with the current state of the art of sleep medicine in Egypt. We conducted a literature review, furthermore the opinion of sleep experts in Egypt was collected and stated in detail, and additionally Egyptian sleep centers were invited to answer a survey in order to collect information about the equipment and trained personnel presented in this chapter. There are three types of Egyptian medical education streams including, the public, private and Al-Azhar medical schools, in which undergraduate and postgraduate medical students can join and earn their degrees but there are no specialized degrees in sleep medicine yet, exact details about medical education in Egypt are provided below. Egypt has numerous health care system providers or sectors: public, private and financing agents’ parastatal providers. Nevertheless, sleep studies remain expensive for the Egyptian public and most insurance companies do not fund it, which makes the expenses of polysomnography the duty of the patient to pay from his own pocket. Egyptian sleep laboratories are governmental and private labs, the governmental labs usually exist in university hospitals, financial and educational hassles make accreditation of these labs by AASM difficult. We provided statistics describing these labs and the type of equipment they use. We tried to discuss the clinical and research sleep status in Egypt, additionally, we tried to suggest solutions for these challenging issues.