Home respiratory therapy becomes more and more frequent. Increased quality of life via a simplified technique

Long-term domiciliary ventilation is an effective treatment for chronic hypoventilation due to neuromuscular disease or thoracic deformity. As the majority of patients require assisted ventilation only at night, it is a simple means of improving quality of life, and even sometimes of prolonging life. According to a nationwide enquiry organised by the Swedish Thoracic Society in 1993, 460 patients (5.5 per 100,000 of the population) were using domiciliary ventilation (almost a doubling of the figure of 250 patients reported from a similar survey in 1990). The most prevalent indications were poliomyelitis sequelae (30%), followed by myopathy (21%), idiopathic scoliosis (13%) and tuberculosis sequelae (13%). Eighty per cent of the patients used assisted ventilation only at night, and 60 per cent used non-invasive devices such as a nasal mask.