Sleep Apnea: More Common Than You Think

Are you tired during the day? Do you wake up with a headache in the mornings, ever? Do your hands and feet seem to fall asleep more than most people’s do? Are you famous in your home for your snoring? Do you have heart palpitations, or a condition called “atrial fibrillation”?

If you answered affirmatively to any of those, you could have sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a condition in which a person stops breathing when they sleep. It happens because the tissues in the throat sag when one relaxes. If you are overweight, then you are many times more likely to have sleep apnea, although thin people can have it too. Typically, apneics start out as snorers. Over time, their snoring gets louder and louder, then, they begin to have pauses in their breathing. THese may last a few seconds in the beginning, and as the disease progresses, they can last well over a minute or more! Worse than that, it happens over and over again all night long. In reality, the person never actually gets any restful sleep. As the brain and body relax, if the airway sags closed, then your brain wakes you up – but only just enough to cough and reposition before nodding back off. Unfortunately, these interruptions prevent you from ever getting into the deeper, restful and restorative sleep patterns that we all require in each 24 hour period.

This causes a number of problems, as you might imagine. The most prevalent is tiredness. Sleep apnea is believed to be one of the major contributors to motor vehicle accidents, and on-the-job injuries. Countless deaths are probably due to sleep apnea. People doze off uncontrollably, and when they are awake, their thought processes are made fuzzy because of the well-known effects of sleep deprivation.

Our bodies actually have a number of housekeeping functions that are only accomplished during sleep. Memory is laid down then, and new learning is integrated and categorized in the synapses of the brain during that time. Also, our endocrine, or hormonal, system runs its checks and balances and produces vital quantities of hormones and other chemicals during sleep. One of these is cortisol, which is our natural arthritis drug.

As the person stops breathing repeatedly during sleep, the blood oxygen level drops, sometimes quite precipitously. This is dangerous in its own right, but more commonly it leads to secondary problems like heart and lung diseases. It takes all day to correct the low oxygen level from a night of apnea, but then the person sleeps again and it happens all over again. Consequently, untreated apneics never get their blood oxygen levels completely normalized. This can have profound effects on asthma, or emphysema patients. It can also cause permament damage to the heart tissue, especially the heart’s natural pacemakers. A great many patients with atrial fibrillation actually have an undiagnosed case of sleep apnea as well. Sleep apnea is a leading cause of elevated blood pressures (hypertension) as well.