Sleep apnea is a common sleep disorder in which breathing becomes shallow or sometimes stops for 10s or more.
According to MedlinePlus, this breathing delay, also known as apnea, can sometimes last 10 seconds or more and happens 30 or more times in a single hour.
According to SleepEducation.org, factors like expanded tonsils or having a thicker neck and small airway can cause sleep apnea to develop at without any age (even infancy). However, some chronic health conditions raise the risk of sleep apnea and make it more common in older people.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute report that despite the condition isis common, it frequently goes undiagnosed because many of the typical signs and symptoms of sleep apnea — loud snoring, gasping for air, and interruptions in breathing — occur while people are sleeping, when they may not be aware of what’s happening (NHLBI).
The underdiagnosis of sleep apnea is serious because, if left untreated, the illness can result in severalseveral health issues, such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and even an increased risk of premature death.
According to Mayo Clinic, this sleep disturbance has also been identified as the root cause of a lot of workplace and automobile accidents since it is linked to persistent daytime drowsiness.
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Types of Sleep Apnea
According to the Sleep Foundation, “apnea” refers to breathing pauses that last 10 seconds or more and are experienced intermittently by people with sleep apnea.
People with the illness frequently experience these apneic episodes while they are asleep, which causes them to partially awaken during the course of the night as they battle to breathe.
These partial awakenings from sleep may occur several hundred times during the course of a night for someone with severe sleep apnea.
Individuals with sleep apnea may not even be aware that they are having disrupted sleep because these awakenings are frequently relatively brief.
However, the episodes can disrupt the sleep cycle and keep someone with sleep apnea from entering the deep, restorative stages of sleep.
And for this reason, even after having what they believed to be a full night’s sleep, persons with sleep apnea often feel extremely exhausted and sleepy the following day.
All cases of sleep apnea are characterized by frequent breathing intervals, although the underlying reason for the interruption differs.
These are the main types of sleep apnea:
1. Obstructive Sleep Apnea
Neeraj Kaplish, MD, the head of sleep labs at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, explains that this is the most typical type of sleep apnea and that it happens when the airway is wholly or partially blocked.
The muscles in our body, particularly the ones in our throat, normally relax as we sleep.
During sleep, the airway often remains wide open to allow unrestricted airflow.
However, when airways get narrow (may be due to thicker neck from birth) and other times because your body weight causes extra fat deposits in the throat), and when you relax, your muscles while you’re asleep, the tissues in the back of your throat can block your airway.
According to SleepEducation.org, this airway obstruction can result in loud snoring, snorting, or gasping for breath while you’re asleep (although not everyone with obstructive sleep apnea snores and not everyone who snores has sleep apnea).
2. Central Sleep Apnea
This kind of apnea happens when the brain’s usual signals to the muscles that govern breathing in the body are interfered with, leading to breathing stopping or becoming very shallow frequently.
According to Robson Capasso, MD, chief of sleep surgery and associate professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, central sleep apnea is a neurological condition as opposed to obstructive sleep apnea is brought on by a physical obstruction.
The brainstem, which governs breathing, is frequently afflicted by a disease or condition in people with central sleep apnea.
Stroke, heart failure, renal issues, a brain lesion or abnormality, and kidney difficulties are the medical complications connected to central sleep apnea.
According to Dr. Capasso, certain drugs that affect how well the brain communicates with muscles, such as sedatives, opioids, or benzodiazepines, may also contribute to central sleep apnea.
3. Complex Syndrome
If a person has both central and obstructive sleep apnea simultaneously, they are said to have complex sleep apnea. People with this kind of sleep apnea frequently first appear to have obstructive sleep apnea. However, when they receive treatment for that illness, and their symptoms don’t go better as they should, doctors start to think that central sleep apnea is also present.
Final Thoughts
Sleep apnea puts a load on your cardiovascular system, making it more deadly when it is not adequately managed (increasing your risk of atrial fibrillation, heart disease, stroke, and other conditions).
Due to severe daily weariness and drowsiness, untreated or improperly managed sleep apnea greatly raises the risk of accidents.
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