Simply put your airway is closing somewhere. Think of it as a plugged-up sink, you don’t know where the plug is happening, but the water is not flowing throw. And now you need to figure out what will work to open up the sink.
How do you open the path again for the water to flow easily? You pull out the plunger and apply some pressure, and down everything goes.
Somewhere from the back of your nose or tongue down your throat, there is an obstruction. It could be fat or just narrow airways. I want to mention you don’t need to be overweight for this to be a problem.
Menopausal Women
I’ve always noticed that women around menopause end up with sleep apnea. For a long time, doctors just wrote off being tired as the process of aging. Only recently did studies start tracking that our Sleep Apnea looks and sounds different than men. Go figure! For me, if I gain 5lbs I end up having mild sleep apnea. It may be a small amount of weight but the cpap uses 10cmH20 of pressure. Drop the weight and no problem with sleep apnea. I’ll go more into this in another article.
The Gold standard for treating Sleep Apnea is pap therapy. But it is not the only thing.
How is SLEEP APNEA Diagnosed?
Home Sleep Test (HST) or office/lab attended tests. Both have their place. A large HMO I partnered with, felt with a positive Epworth score, and an HST was good 90% of the time. They need to treat as many of their patients as possible. I held classes for them setting up 30 patients at a time. Back then then cpaps and mask where much simpler. I had a success rate of 80% to 90%. Which was pretty good, for most it hovers around 50%.
Often folks will walk into my office and say something like, “I never fell asleep” or “I only fell asleep for a couple of minutes the test didn’t work.” After I walk them through how to read the study, they can see what’s going on.
The studies themselves look something like an EKG strip. The difference between an HST and a lab is many, but the outcome is the same.
Why treat Sleep Apnea?
Not everyone feels tired; some folks push through their day. I have had professional football, basketball, and baseball players as clients. All have said their game is better after they started using cpap. The oxygen is getting to their brain, their hearts are allowed to rest at night and the stress of the day is erased. These are guys at the height of their profession but they are still at risk from what untreated Sleep Apnea can do to their body.
LOW OXYGEN
The lowered oxygen and sometimes the higher CO2 can cause stress on the heart muscle that is not fixable. It can alter the brain and every organ in the body. The human body requires oxygen to work at its peak. Almost daily I hear from patients after treatment that they think clearer and have more energy through the day.
UNTREATED SLEEP APNEA
What will happen if you don’t treat your sleep apnea. Not much. You’ll be tired all the time, you’ll put yourself at risk for strokes, heart attacks, and dementia. At the very least the honey-do list does not get taken care of.
