My Life and Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea is becoming a growing problem in this country and it is probably due to obesity. It seems strange because at the same time the idea of living a healthy lifestyle and eating well-balanced meals are also getting a lot of press. One of the reasons is that as a population we are growing older and unfortunately fatter. Of course gaining weigh will bring on more sickness and more visits to the doctor’s office. And we all know about how high the cost of healthcare is today so anything to eliminate those doctors’ visits is a good thing. Everyone knows or are finding out that not dealing with sleep apnea can have a profound effect on your life. Less sleep can effect your personality as well as your general thought process but probably the biggest effect is what it does to your heart. When you have sleep apnea there is a blockage in the back of your throat that causes you to stop breathing. The brain recognizes this lack of oxygen and forces you to awake. With those with slee...

Heart disease and sleep apnea unfortunately have a connection. I know this first hand because my father died of a heart attack and he had sleep apnea. As I have written in an earlier post when he started to have heart attacks no one talked about sleep apnea. No one ever mentioned the term, so he didn’t know that he had a sleeping disorder . What does sleep apnea do to the heart ? Sleep apnea causes breathing to stop many times, even hundreds of times during the night. The sleep apnea sufferer wakes up to catch their breath and then fall back to sleep only to wake again a few minutes later. This happens so many times that they don’t even remember waking up. The body has to wake up because of the fear of suffocation. The effect of the vicious cycle is the loss of oxygen to the body. This condition may lead to coronary heart disease and high blood pressure. And if you already have heart disease from some other cause sleep apnea will make it much worse. The scary part about all th...