My Life and Sleep Apnea

It used to be that sleep apnea was a strange term that few people had heard of. The phrase sleep apnea wasn’t even used till 1978 when a Harvard Physician Dr. John Remmer first coined the phrase Obstructive Sleep apnea . And the cpap wasn't invented till 1981. So the public has really been aware of this problem only for the last thirty years or so. But now with obesity on the rise in children and adults it has become a real problem. The question is, where can you find information about sleep apnea?   The American Sleep Apnea foundation has a wonderful website with quite a bit of information plus it has a terrific forum where sleep apnea patients help each other out with advice and encouragement.   For basic information about sleep apnea the National Institutes of Health has a website that describes sleep apnea and goes over the root causes and the general treatments for sleep apnea. They also have interesting animation that shows how the airway is blocked at nigh...

As I have mentioned in a previous post my father had sleep apnea. I believe that his sleep apnea played a part in his heart problems and subsequent fatal heart attack. That was in 1977. No one at that time even mentioned that he might have had sleep apnea. Of course people have been suffering from this sleep disorder for a long time. Treatments for sleep apnea are relatively new. The history of sleep apnea Strangely enough the first mention of sleep apnea came in a round about way from literature. A 20th century physician, William Osler, a fan of Charles Dickens, noticed that one of the characters in the Pickwick Papers had a sleeping disorder that now could be considered Obstructive Sleep Apnea . Osler referred to patients who had similar problems as “Pickwickian. “ In 1965 a group of French Doctors, lead by Dr. Gastault determined that the interruption of sleep happened over and over again every night. In 1978 a Harvard Physician Dr. John Remmer made the connection between th...