Sleep apnea affects millions of Americans and many do not know they suffer from it. Please read the following common questions about sleep apnea to help you better understand the condition and its treatments. What is sleep apnea? Sleep apnea is a serious condition where a person suffers from frequent pauses in breathing. These pauses, along with episodes of stopped breathing, may happen 5 to 30 times per hour. Sleep apnea is a chronic condition that can disrupt your sleep approximately three times a week. What are symptoms of sleep apnea? Sleep apnea symptoms range from pauses of breath, snoring, gasping for breath during sleep, fatigue during the day, insomnia, difficulty with memory, dry mouth and headaches upon waking up. The pauses in breathing move you out of deep sleep and into light sleep causing extreme daytime sleepiness. What treatments are there for sleep apnea? If you have mild sleep apnea, there are a few easy steps you can take to reduce the causes of the condition including: • Sleeping on your side
• Reducing your intake of alcohol and sedative drugs
• Quitting smoking
• Losing weight
• Taking part in decongestant therapy
A treatment for severe sleep apnea cases is nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). CPAP uses a mask that you wear during the night to help open up your airways. The mask is attached to a machine that regulates the pressure of air to make breathing easier. Another treatment for severe cases is the DNA appliance. This appliance helps guide the teeth, the temporomandibular joint (TMJ), and airways into the proper position for better breathing during sleep. This treatment not only helps reduce sleep apnea issues, but it also reduces snoring. Are there different types of sleep apnea? Yes, there are three different types of sleep apnea. These types are central, obstructive, and mixed sleep apnea. Central sleep apnea is rare and is the most dangerous of the three. With this type, your brain neglects to tell your breathing muscles to work. This leads to the person with central sleep apnea to sleep through an episode and may result in death. Obstructive sleep apnea is the most common. This type is caused by the soft palate tissue in the back of the throat collapsing and closing off the airway passages while you sleep. The person suffering from obstructive sleep apnea may wake up snorting and gasping for breath, but they may fall back asleep quickly enough that they do not realize what has occurred. Mixed sleep apnea is a mixture of the two first types. Often times, an episode of stopped breathing starts out with a central component and ends up turning into an obstructive component. If you have any more questions about sleep apnea, please visit Dr. Sue Wendling’s Cosmetic Dentistry website for more information. She will answer all of your sleep apnea questions in a personal consultation in Portland, Oregon.