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Is Sleep Apnea A Deadly Disorder? Being a common disorder, sleep apnea can cause a person to have one or more pauses in breathing while he or she is sleeping. There are 3 types of apnea, namely obstructive, central and mixed, of which obstructive apnea is the most common one. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NHLBI), it affects more than 12 million Americans while the figure estimated by The National Sleep Foundation is 18 million. People with untreated sleep apnea could stop breathing repeatedly during their sleep. Breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to minutes, and they often occur 5 to 30 times or more an hour. For patients with severe sleep apnea, his or her airway is blocked and suffers for 20 to 30 seconds and wakes up. Strong snoring can be a symptom but interestingly, people with sleep apnea rarely know that they have difficulty to breath even upon awakening. Sleep apnea frequently results in poor sleep quality and makes people tired during the day. In fact, sleep apnea is one of the leading causes of excessive daytime sleepiness. Some of the risk factors identified for sleep apnea include male gender, being overweight; over the age of 40, having a large neck size; larger tonsils and having a family history of sleep apnea. However, it is important to note that sleep apnea can affect anyone, including children.
It is believed that untreated sleep apnea can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, memory problems, headaches; increase risk for or worsen heart failure; make irregular heartbeats more likely; increase chance of having work-related or driving accidents and academic underachievement in children and adolescents. However, scientists have not been able to quantify how much more likely it makes a person to die. In a paper published on August 17, 2009 in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine, Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported that severe sleep apnea could be deadly as it raises the risk of dying early by 46 percent. But they also stressed that this does not apply to people with milder sleep-breathing problems. In the NHLBI-funded study, the researches followed 6,400 men and women for an average of 8 years, and discovered that those who started with major sleep apnea were 46 percent more likely to die from any cause, regardless of age, sex, race, weight or smoking. They also found that people, especially men aged between 40 and 70, with severe breathing disorders during the sleep were more likely to die from a variety of causes than similar people without such sleep disorders. Among the men in the study, 42.9 percent did not have sleep-disordered breathing, 33.2 percent had mild disease, 15.7 percent had moderate disease, and 8.2 percent had severe disease. For women in the study, about 25 percent had mild sleep apnea, 8 percent had moderate disease and 3 percent had severely disordered breathing. The researchers also indicated in the paper some means to treat sleep apnea. Weight loss was quoted as the best treatment. But they felted that the most successful treatment could be CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) mask, which applies pressure to help keep the airways of a patient open while they sleep, allowing normal breathing. On the other hand, surgery to remove tonsil can be a feasible option while using a mouth guard to pull a patient’s mouth forward can be another possible alternative.
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