Many people have trouble with sleeping and much of that I want to tackle in another segment, but the most readily treatable sleep problem has got to be sleep apnea.
You might have heard about this on commercials or from friends because it has become much more easy to diagnose because of the advances in making testing easier over the last 10-15 years. Typically when we sleep, we are supposed to take slow, deep breaths through most of the night as our bodies enter their resting state. It's sort of like putting your breathing muscles on cruise control.
People with sleep apnea have episodes of apnea (where they stop breathing for a prolonged period) or hypopnea (very slowed, shallow breathing) and right after this have episodes where the breathing rate, heart rate and blood pressure go up higher and sometimes wake up mildly or completely. Versus the cruise control analogy, this would be more like being in stop-and-go traffic on 101.
Now picture how your body feels when you're driving down the highway on cruise control versus sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And imagine doing that for a third of your day, every day. That's the toll that sleep apnea can take on the body. If left untreated, sleep apnea can lead to cloudy thinking, poor work performance and memory, and increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, liver disease, complications during surgery, car accidents, and overall death.
Why does this happen? A lot of things can contribute to it. The most common type is obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) where the size of the upper airway gets reduced. The biggest condition that contributes to this is being overweight because the extra fat around the neck puts more pressure on the trachea than it's designed to take and messes with the airflow. Other things like enlarged tonsils, nasal congestion, and abnormal jaw size can contribute to this as well. OSA is more common in men than women and also gets more common the older we get, peaking around the 50's and 60's.
Just because you snore, or rather someone told you that you snore, doesn't mean you have sleep apnea. But there are a number of ways to try to figure out who should be screened and the two best ones are the STOP-BANG questionnaire and the Epworth Sleepiness Scale. I encourage you to take a look at these and let me know if your score is on the high end because we should probably get you tested.
The sleep test used to involve months of waiting to get a spot at a sleep clinic where they monitor you for the night. These days, we have a take-home monitor that's really easy to use. It's basically a large wristlet with a sensor on one finger and one on your chest. You take a quick class where they go over the few ins and outs of it, wear it for at least 4 hours one night and then turn it back in. The results are pretty cool to see as it tracks how much time you spend in each position, how much and how loudly and in what positions you snore, and of course your breathing and wakefulness patterns.
The standard treatment for OSA is as much weight loss as you're able to achieve because oftentimes that will cure the problem. CPAP/BiPAP is the other most common treatment and is a breathing mask you wear when sleeping to help regulate the sleep patterns. These too have improved over the year from being big, bulky things to much quieter and smaller with many mask patterns for people to try - there's even a very small travel version, albeit a little pricey.
There are a number of other less common treatments out there as well - I would be remiss in not mentioning one person who only had sleep apnea when he slept on his back, so even though he'd been doing that for 60+ years, he taped a bunch of tennis balls to his back and cured himself of his back sleeping over a few weeks and no longer has sleep apnea.
So please let me know if you want any more information about this or if you're interested in getting tested as OSA is one of those few things where people almost immediately notice a big difference when it starts being treated.