My Life and Sleep Apnea

Sleep apnea is divided into obstructive sleep apnea and central sleep apnea. Obstructive is caused by blockage of the airway and central apnea, which is less common, is caused when the brain doesn’t send signals to the muscles to breathe. As with most things there are different levels of severity of sleep apnea. With obstructive sleep apnea the range of severity can be determined by a sleep study that counts the number of apnea, or cessation of breathing, that occurs if the number isn’t high, and then your sleep apnea might be cured by an oral device or by just losing weight. It should also be noted that not all awakening are the same there are apneas and there are micro-arousals . What is a micro-arousal ? According to psychosomaticmedicine.org micro arousals are “a sudden transient cortical activation during sleep, but does not necessarily result in a behavioral awakening. The origin of an arousal is usually "cortical" but it can also be generated in response to sen...

It is hard to believe in this age of instant information, where all the health issues seem to be just a few clicks away, that some people haven’t heard of OSA and what is worst they may even have undiagnosed sleep apnea. As I have written in past posts I have had sleep apnea for years. My wife complained about my snoring and I tried sleeping on my side, sleeping on my stomach, I put those bandage like things on my nose but nothing stopped my snoring. A friend of mine went to have a sleep study done and he told me that he had sleep apnea, which was something that I had never heard about before. I did a little research on what sleep apnea was and what you could do about it. I made an doctor’s appointment and he set me up for a sleep study. Like so many people I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. At that time I also realized that my father had sleep apnea. He wasn’t diagnosed with it. He also had heart disease. As I wrote in my last post the study of sleep apnea barely had begun whe...

This past week the weather here in the Atlanta area has been horrendous. In the part of the metro Atlanta area that I live in had over 20 inches of rain in the past 7 days. Luckily we were spared any flooding damage. But the weather did make my meniere’s disease and my sleep apnea worse. Sleeping with sleep apnea is always difficult but for some reason it is particularly hard when the weather is bad. I had to do a little research to find out why. It seems that the atmospheric pressure has some effect on OSA patients. Whereas altitude changes have more effects on central apnea patients. My source for this information is MedPageToday.com . Although they found a connection between sleep apnea and weather changes they are not exactly sure why it occurs. I think a lot of my problems this week were due to the sound of thunder and the amount of stress I had worrying about the house being flooded. But everything seems to be okay now; of course I still have the sleep apnea. I still int...