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Sleep Apnea
Quality restful sleep is essential to good health. It allows your body to recover and reduces inflammation. Without adequate sleep, your hormones can get out of whack. Untreated sleep apnea can cause high blood pressure and other cardiovascular disease, memory problems, weight gain, impotency, and headaches. If you suffer from sleep disturbances, home sleep apnea apparatus can help us determine if sleep apnea is indeed the cause so that we can remedy the condition.
There are three types of apnea: obstructive, central, and mixed; of the three, obstructive is the most common. Despite the difference in the root cause of each, in all three, if you have untreated sleep apnea you actually stop breathing repeatedly while you are sleeping, sometimes hundreds of times during the night and often for a minute or longer. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is caused by a blockage of the airway, usually when the soft tissue in the rear of your throat collapses and closes during sleep. In central sleep apnea, your airway is not blocked but your brain fails to signal the muscles to breathe. Mixed apnea, as the name implies, is a combination of the two. With each apnea event, your brain briefly arouses you in order for you to resume breathing. Consequently your sleep is extremely fragmented and of poor quality.
The Silent Epidemic!
According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep apnea is as common as adult diabetes, and affects more than twelve million Americans. Risk factors include being male, overweight, and over the age of forty, but sleep apnea can strike anyone at any age, even children. Yet still because of the lack of awareness by the public and healthcare professionals, the vast majority remain undiagnosed and therefore untreated, despite the fact that this serious disorder can have significant consequences.
Previously, you could only receive definitive sleep apnea evaluation by spending the night in a sleep lab, at great cost and inconvenience. Now, with this state-of-the-art technology our home sleep apnea study provides a convenient tool.
At Full Potential Health we will also consider your hormone levels, adrenal and pituitary functioning as well as lifestyle and nutrition factors to see how these might affect your sleep patterns.
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