Weight Reduction in the Management of Sleep Apnea and Snoring
Weight loss will also lower blood pressure and lessen the risk for numerous other problems from type II diabetes to arthritic joint disease. If you are overweight, the medical consequences are always significant. Read More...
Treatment of Obstructive Sleep Apnea with
Positive Airway Pressure
Why treat OSA with positive airway pressure (PAP)? OSA is a
disease of vicious cycles. Because of this, it does not
self-correct, and in fact tends to get worse over time. OSA causes
or exacerbates a long list of other problems.
Older patients with very severe apnea sometimes ask “What’s wrong
with dying in my sleep? It sounds like a good way to go.” Instead of
dying, however, they could have a debilitating stroke or heart
attack, leaving them incapacitated and dependent on others for care.
We also know that untreated OSA contributes to dementia. Read More...
A Patient's Guide to Understanding Sleep Apnea
Apnea is the combination of two Greek words, (a and pnea) meaning ("a") without and ("pnea") air. Sleep apnea refers to the loss of air movement during sleep. This results in a depletion of oxygen and a build up of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood. Read More...
Snoring
At Sleep Consultants, our typical patient is referred for evaluation because of loud and obnoxious snoring and excessive daytime sleepiness. Most are on an antihypertensive medication and a history of heart disease is common. The majority are males who are also overweight. A typical patient is a male who is over 35, weighs about 235 pounds, snores loudly and is sleepy whenever quiet. Several epidemiological studies have demonstrated that people who habitually snore loudly have an increased incidence of cardiovascular disease. This is true even if obesity is not a factor. These individuals experience more hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, strokes and heart attacks than similar people who do not snore. They may also exhibit more hostility. At our clinic, the link to cardiovascular disease and daytime sleepiness is usually because of coexisting sleep apnea. Briefly, this is a syndrome involving episodes of hypoxemia in sleep induced by airway collapse that is reversed but repeated many times across the night. We will discuss this in more detail later. However, why most loud snoring individuals have an increased risk for these problems is unclear. The purpose of this paper is to discuss what we know about snoring and probable mechanisms for this link.
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Normal Sleep
Sleep occurs because of the happy coincidence of two natural forces. These are the accumulation of a sleep debt or a need to sleep due to a period of prior wakefulness and a daily physiological urge to sleep that comes as a part of the body's physiological 24-hour rhythm. Our sleep debt starts accumulating from the moment we stop sleeping and increases the longer we are awake. It is the price we pay for wake and sleeping pays it off. We usually need about 8 hours of sleep to fuel wakefulness for the next 16 hours. After 16 hours, it is sufficiently strong to support sleep onset. Without dissipation by sleep, our sleep debt will increase in strength but reaches a maximum level after about 24 hours and will dominate all of life thereafter. Read More... | 
