Sleep Apnea and Common Symptoms of it

What is sleep apnea?
Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder that causes a person to stop breathing during their sleep.  Most people who suffer from it stop breathing for about 10 seconds but there are some people that may go for up to one full minute without breathing.  The person will wake up and start breathing again and often times the person doesn’t even know its happening.  It’s nothing for a person who suffers from sleep apnea to stop breathing and wake up about a 100 times a night.  Hard to imagine isn’t it?  There can be cases that turn fatal when someone doesn’t wake up and they end up suffocating to death.  Even a person that doesn’t have a fatality from sleep apnea can have harmful effects due to sleep deprivation.

The most common form of sleep apnea that is talked about is obstructive sleep apnea.  This happens when a person stops breathing due to an obstruction of their airway.  The obstruction is usually caused by the throat of back of the mouth.  The other type, less talked about, of sleep apnea is called central sleep apnea.  This form of the disorder is a nervous disorder when there is a problem with the signal from the brain to the body telling it to breathe.  Obviously the second form just mentioned is much more serious and caused by a brain stem or nervous system injury or disease.

What are the symptoms of sleep apnea?
There are two types of symptoms that sleep apnea causes.  The first are those that are caused by the actual condition and include:

Waking up in the middle of the night, usually gasping for air
Loud Snoring
Stopping breathing during the night.  This can be reported by a partner or by using a tape recorder
Waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat
Sore throat, dry mouth or headaches after sleeping

The other symptoms I’m going to talk about are actually caused by sleep deprivation.  Even if you are getting a full night’s sleep you may still find yourself deprived of certain types of sleep.  Those symptoms are:

Feeling very tired even after sleeping a full night
Falling asleep during the day
Memory loss
Short attention span
Depression or mood swings
Not able to solve problems or poor judgment
Weight gain

If you are concerned that you could possibly be suffering from this disorder, there are certain causes and risk factors you need to be aware of.  Many risk factors you can’t control, such as age, being male, or throat structure there are some that you can control.  Just by making some lifestyle changes you may be able to reduce your apnea without medical attention.  These factors include:

Being overweight, especially in your neck area
Interrupted sleep patterns, especially regular changes that are caused by shift work
Smoking
Sleep aids and alcohol.  These relax your throat muscles which makes them more likely to get in the way, obstructing your airway.
Allergies or anything that causes nasal blockage.

If you have tried fixing the problems mentioned above, such as being overweight, and still don’t notice a difference be sure to seek medical treatment.  Your doctor will more than likely send you to a sleep specialists that can diagnose and give you proper treatment for your sleep apnea, if that’s what it ends up being.

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