Are you wondering if you might have sleep apnea? Do you wake up feeling like you never really went to sleep? You eat well, exercise regularly, and get a full night’s sleep but still feel exhausted during the day? From behind bloodshot eyes, has your partner recently threatened to smother you with either the cat or a pillow if you don’t stop snoring? If so, you could be suffering from a condition you have known as sleep apnea…and so could your significant other!
What’s Sleep Apnea?
Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by repeated interruptions to your breathing pattern. Throughout the night you experience frequent periods where your breathing will literally stop for anywhere between a few seconds up to periods lasting tens of seconds before taking another breath. This intermittent breathing sequence can create excessive periods of prolonged snoring, choking, or gasping throughout the night. Of the various types of sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea is by far the most common. It’s characterized, as the name suggests, by an obstruction. When you sleep your body relaxes. With obstructed sleep apnea the muscles of the throat intermittently relax, with can subsequently block your airway. Ironically, the majority of people with sleep apnea typically don’t even know they have it until their partner alerts them to the possibility or they receive a professional diagnosis.
What are the Symptoms?
- Snoring: Prolonged, loud, excessive snoring during the night is one of the most frequently recognized symptoms of sleep apnea. In other words, you snore loudly all night long. You don’t know it but your bedmate does. Just ask them! People with sleep apnea can stop breathing up to thirty times an hour or once every two minutes! This ‘loss of breath’ can create a choking sensation, causing you to suddenly inhale. This inhalation is what leads to loud snoring, gasping or coughing.
- Exhaustion: It doesn’t matter if you get a full ten hours of sleep – you still wake up the next morning feeling like you’ve been up all night. Although you were asleep; you never achieved the deep, restful sleep necessary to regenerate your mind and body. As a result, your level of fatigue increases daily, thereby, adversely affecting both your mental and physical capabilities.
- Sore, Dry Throat: You wake up each morning with a dry or sore throat. You look and find that your throat is red and slightly swollen but, you aren’t sick. The inflammation and discomfort are due to constant snoring, gasping, and coughing that irritate the soft tissue in your throat. As a result, it creates that same scratchy, sore, dry sensation you get when you have a cold.
- Forgetfulness: You just can’t seem to remember anything! In fact, it feels like you’re operating in a fog where it’s difficult to lock in on things. Simple things like making change, remembering the extra item you were going to get at the store (that you didn’t write down), spelling a word or the time of your next meeting are all more of a challenge than they should be. While cognitive issues could certainly be symptomatic of something larger and should be evaluated, forgetfulness is frequently symptomatic of sleep deprivation caused by sleep apnea.
- Falling Asleep: Falling asleep is a good thing…unless it’s at work, in social situations, or while driving! If no amount of caffeine in the world helps you to stay awake, and ten hours of sleep doesn’t seem like enough, you may be experiencing a very serious side effect of sleep apnea.
- Mood Shifts: Irritability or constant changes in temperament could be a sign that the sleep you’re getting simply isn’t restful. Prolonged sleep deprivation, as a result of sleep apnea, will definitely contribute to moments where even the simplest inconvenience can cause increased agitation.
- Morning Headache: Sometimes mornings are difficult enough on their own; you don’t need to add a headache to the list of things that you don’t want to deal with that early. Because your airflow is constricted, the amount of oxygen traveling to the brain is reduced. And, less oxygen traveling to the brain can create headaches.
- Night Sweats: With sleep apnea, your body is literally fighting for air all night long. As such, it goes into panic mode due to a lack of oxygen. This pattern begins to produce stress on the body which, in turn, reacts by producing more of a stress hormone called cortisol to help restart your breathing.
- Reduced Sex Drive: When you’re tired or exhausted, it can be difficult enough to work, play golf or spend time with the children or friends, let alone have the energy for a romantic interlude with your partner. And, even if you do somehow find the interest or the energy, your body may not respond the way you’d like it to respond.
Is Sleep Apnea Dangerous?
Aside from creating a tremendous annoyance for your partner, and possibly anyone else within hearing range, sleep apnea can pose potentially significant health risks to you. Although sleep apnea itself won’t kill you, it does have the ability to create systemic issues that are capable of creating serious long-term health issues – some of which may possibly result in death. A drop in oxygen levels, due to an obstructed airway, can lead to both short and long-term consequences. For men and women, decreased oxygen levels can seriously impact mental and physical fatigue, anxiety, high blood pressure, diabetes, strokes, and even set the stage for heart failure. As an example, in men reduced oxygen levels can lead to vascular issues resulting in erectile dysfunction. Sleep apnea is not just an interruption to your and your partner’s sleep, if undiagnosed, untreated, and allowed to progress it can foster dangerous systemic problems with severe consequences.
What Treatments Are Available?
Depending on the severity of your obstructed sleep apnea there are a number of treatment options available. Solutions range from simple lifestyle changes (in the mildest cases) to surgical solutions (in the more extreme cases.) Regardless of where you fall on the scale, there are plenty of viable methods to help you get a truly restful night’s sleep and regain your mental acuity, energy levels, and overall health – not to mention what it will do for your partner’s sanity!
- Lifestyle Changes:
- Sleep on your side with your head raised. Don’t sleep on your back with your head flat on the pillow.
- Lose weight if you’re clinically overweight
- Don’t eat or drink several hours prior to going to bed, especially alcohol
- Stop smoking
- Use an inhaler or nasal decongestant
- Exercise on a regular basis
- CPAP Machine: CPAP stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. A CPAP Machine is used while you sleep to pump a continuous stream of air into your airway. The stream of air is gentle enough to create just the right amount of pressure to keep your overly relaxed throat muscles from collapsing into your airway, thereby, blocking it and reducing your ability to breathe while you sleep.
- Dental Sleep Mouthpiece: An oral appliance that’s used during sleep to help keep your throat open and your airway clear. It works by slightly bringing the lower jaw forward or by repositioning your tongue, depending on the type of mouthpiece recommended by your dentist. Used primarily for mild to moderate cases of obstructive sleep apnea, a mouthpiece is one of the least invasive, simplest, easy-to-use corrective solutions.
- Surgery: For the more advanced, severe cases of obstructed sleep apnea, surgery is frequently the most viable alternative. There are a variety of different procedures used in surgically correcting a person’s airway to improve function, eliminate symptoms, and decrease the risk of harmful systemic problems developing over time. However, as with all surgeries they range from mildly invasive to extremely invasive and each comes with its own degree of success and potential complications. Any decision this involved should always include your dentist and physician.
Farragut and Knoxville’s Cosmetic Dentist
As a cosmetic dentist, Dr. Jack Haney has the ability to care for our family and restorative patients on a very comprehensive level. Given that cosmetic dentistry provides complete oral health care with an emphasis on preventive and maintenance measures, corrects oral imperfections, and helps to enhance a patient’s overall facial esthetics, we’re extremely detail-oriented and meticulous regarding the caliber of our work and the care we extend to each and every patient. If there’s anything we can do to help you or your family, whether it’s sleep apnea, cosmetic, family, or restorative in nature, please contact us here.
