How Can Treating Sleep Apnea Raise Your Life Expectancy?

Think about how good you feel after a night when you slept soundly. Unfortunately, many people with sleep apnea don’t get to experience that very often. Not getting quality sleep or enough shuteye can be very detrimental, even affecting how long a person lives in some cases. Keep reading to learn from a sleep apnea specialist in The Woodlands how this condition affects the human body, why it is dangerous, and how treatment can help.

How Does Sleep Apnea Affect You?

Sleep apnea is a serious disorder that occurs when your breathing stops and starts while you sleep. It’s different from regular snoring, although both happen when the tissues in the back of your throat vibrate. But people with sleep apnea snore much louder, pause when they breathe for over 10 seconds, are restless throughout the night, and take shallow breaths, gasp, or choke.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most common type. It occurs when your airways become completely or partially blocked over and over during sleep. It causes your diaphragm and chest muscles to work harder than normal to open your airways. You may start to breathe with loud gasps or jerk your body. OSA can affect your sleep, lower the flow of oxygen to your vital organs, and lead to abnormal heart rhythms.

Why Is OSA Dangerous?

The frequent rise and fall of oxygen levels due to OSA puts a lot of stress on the body. Over time, this stress can take a severe toll on a person’s health. A person who hasn’t been dealing with OSA for long will initially feel side effects like low energy, lack of motivation, mood swings, and fatigue, while the long-term consequences may not be noticeable yet.

Sleep apnea actually increases the risk of death by 17 percent, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine! That figure may seem high, but consider all the health conditions sleep apnea can trigger:

• Obesity
• Cardiomyopathy
• Diabetes
• Heart disease
• Stroke
• Heart rhythm problems
• Hypertension
• High blood pressure

Each of those conditions alone can decrease life expectancy, so it is crucial to get tested if you have some sleep apnea symptoms.

How Can OSA Treatment Protect You?

Before a sleep specialist helps you find a solution for OSA, they will want to confirm your symptoms are definitely the result of a sleep disorder. Although they used to be conducted in a special laboratory, nowadays, sleep specialists can offer you a home sleep study.

You can wear a special monitoring device overnight to gather data like your sleeping heart rate, oxygen level, blood pressure, limb movement, and breathing effort. If you are deemed to have sleep apnea, the doctor can then provide you with oral appliance therapy. This treatment uses a custom-made mouthpiece worn during the night to prevent interruption of your breathing.

The doctor will ensure it fits comfortably, and they generally have several appliances to choose from. Some people use continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines to treat sleep apnea, while others count on a combination of an oral appliance and a CPAP machine.

Regardless of the method, a sleep specialist will help you figure out how to win the battle against this disorder. When you consider all the health conditions untreated sleep apnea can bring to your doorstep, it is absolutely worth seeking professional help. It’s one thing for your breathing to get cut short at night, but you don’t want to risk your life getting cut short as well.

About the Author

Dr. Robert Dernick earned his dental doctorate from the University of Texas and opened his first dental practice in The Woodlands in 1980. After years of practicing general and cosmetic dentistry, he began to study the specialty field of sleep dentistry. Now, he can provide safe, effective, and noninvasive sleep apnea therapy to patients via custom-made oral appliances. If you seek a sleep study and/or an oral appliance, you can schedule a consultation on his website or call (281) 783-3419.