Im pretty sure you have heard about sleep apnea sometime in your life. However many people have a misconception of it. In one of my classes at UTPA the teacher asked us to define sleep apnea. Many people believed that sleep apnea was a condition in which a person falls asleep without notice. To be honest with you I was one of the many who had that misconception
According to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, sleep apnea is a common disorder in which you have one or more pauses in breathing or shallow breaths while you sleep.Breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to minutes. They may occur 30 times or more an hour. Typically, normal breathing then starts again, sometimes with a loud snort or choking sound.Sleep apnea usually is a chronic (ongoing) condition that disrupts your sleep. When your breathing pauses or becomes shallow, you’ll often move out of deep sleep and into light sleep.As a result, the quality of your sleep is poor, which makes you tired during the day. Sleep apnea is a leading cause of excessive daytime sleepiness.
A sleep test, called polysomnography is usually done to diagnose sleep apnea. There are two kinds of polysomnograms. An overnight polysomnography test involves monitoring brain waves, muscle tension, eye movement, respiration, oxygen level in the blood and audio monitoring. (for snoring, gasping, etc.) The second kind of polysomnography test is a home monitoring test. A Sleep Technologist hooks you up to all the electrodes and instructs you on how to record your sleep with a computerized polysomnograph that you take home and return in the morning. They are painless tests that are usually covered by insurance.
There are many treatments for sleep apnea. One of the most used is CPAP which is a mask that fits snugly over the nose and delivers pressured air just enough to keep your breathing passages open.
People with sleep apnea are constantly having to wake to be able to breathe. This could happen several hundred times during the night. When this interruption happens, the person is not able to go into REM sleep. They are not able to go through the stages of sleeping that most of us take for granted.That is why during the day they fall asleep almost everywhere. That was where my misconception was. I thought that sleep apnea was when a person fell asleep without any control but they fall asleep because they did not sleep in the night. I included a video that shows how a person with sleep apnea battles through the night to get some rest.
More information on sleep apnea click here.
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/sleepapnea/
I wrote about sleep apnea too. It must suck to not be able to sleep all the time throughout the whole night due to not being able to breath correctly. I get super agitated when I have a cold and my nose is congested and I keep repeatedly waking up at nigt...but then again in that case I am aware that I wake up versus in sleep apnea when at times they are unaware of the disturbances. There are actually several life threatening consequences for people with sleep apnea who go without some kind of treatment to help lessen it.
ReplyDeleteI find it staggering that people suffering from sleep apnea experience breathing pauses as many as 30 times within a single hour and that these pauses can last up to minute. Your description of the polysomnography sleep apnea test is interesting; I had no idea that that sleep tests like these existed. The video you posted showing a clear-cut example of sleep apnea is very informative in revealing how debilitating this sleep disorder really is.
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