If you or a family members suffers from sleep apnea, it is important that you understand what sleep apnea is and how your health is impacted. Treatment for sleep apnea is readily available, and delaying appropriate treatment can lead to serious consequences.
What is Sleep Apnea?
Sleep apnea is a serious disorder that collapses the airway of the sleep apnea sufferer. The condition is characterized by loud snoring and occurs more frequently in overweight males and other people whose necks are more than 17 inches in diameter.
A sleep apnea sufferer’s sleep is constantly interrupted, up to 80 or more times every night. During an eight-hour sleep session, someone who suffers from sleep apnea may never sleep soundly for more than ten minutes at a time.
Sleep Apnea can impact more than your health
Sleep Apnea can impact your sex life
One way sleep apnea impacts your health is that it decreases your sexual desire and arousal. Sleep apnea can also cause your orgasms to be less intense. In a recent study, patients who were treated for sleep apnea reported significant improvement in their love life after they underwent treatment for sleep apnea.
Sleep Apnea daytime sleepiness
Another way that sleep apnea impacts your health is that it causes extreme daytime drowsiness.
Sleep Apnea and increased risk of car accidents
In a Canadian study of 800 people suffering from obstructive sleep apnea, it was found that the patients were almost five times more likely than drivers without sleep apnea to have head-on car accidents and accidents involving physical injury. Even patients with only mild sleep apnea had the same increased risk of accidents as patients with severe sleep apnea. Understanding this will hopefully persuade a sleep apnea sufferer to seek immediate treatment.
Sleep Apnea can increase the risk of diabetes
Another way sleep apnea impacts health is through an increased risk of diabetes. Every time your airway collapses while you sleep, you stop breathing and your body suffers from low levels of oxygen in the blood. Your brain tries to wake you up by flooding your bloodstream with a surge of hormones. You wake up, you go back to sleep, and the cycle repeats itself, again and again, until it’s time to get up in the morning. The surge of hormones and chemicals your brain orders your glands to secrete into your bloodstream when you stop breathing creates stress hormones that scientists believe affect the cells in your body that make insulin, a hormone related to diabetes. Click here to find out more about snoring sleep apnea warning signs.
A recognized way to assist obstructive sleep apnea and reduce storing is to wear a stop snoring chin strap while sleeping. Read our review of the stop snoring chin strap.
Once you understand what sleep apnea is and sought professional consultation this may be the treatment option that works for you.
