If you wake up in the morning feeling as if you have barely slept, you may have sleep apnea. Although this is a relatively rare condition, if it is not diagnosed and left untreated, it can be life-threatening. This disrupts your sleep pattern throughout the night, which means you don’t get enough sleep, if any, from REM sleep, which is why you wake up broken. If this seems to be a common occurrence for you and you have ruled out all of the other potential sleep disturbances, sleep disturbances and tried various insomnia treatments. You may want to consider talking to your general practitioner.
Sleep apnea occurs when you stop breathing while you sleep. In turn, this depletes the body’s oxygen supply and your carbon dioxide levels increase, these two levels becoming lower and higher respectively, is enough for your body’s emergency arousal response to fire. And stops you from sleeping so you can start breathing again. It can all happen so quickly that you are unaware of the sequence of events and have no idea that you woke up and fell asleep back. This is how your REM sleep is so severely disrupted, as it takes time for your body to get into the rhythm of non-REM and REM sleep, gradually leading to longer and more extended REM sleep periods throughout the night. By being always awake all night, you get only the bare minimum, if any, REM sleep.
There are three different types of sleep apnea, differentiated by their cause. The classes are obstructive, central and mixed. Understanding the type of apnea you suffer from is imperative for getting the right treatment.
Obstructive sleep apnea surgery hong kong occurs when the top of the airways is blocked by either soft palate tissue, throat tissue, or even the tongue. It doesn’t stop breathing altogether, but it causes such restriction in breathing that no air can get in and out of your lungs, even if your chest muscles are making all the right moves. This causes the same changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels that would occur when breathing stops completely and therefore triggers an emergency arousal response.
Fortunately, central sleep apnea is the rarest form of apnea. The respiratory ENTific Sleep Apnea Centre of the brain or central nervous system stops working during sleep, which means that the chest muscles are not receiving the correct nerve impulses to perform the right kinds of movements necessary for breathing.
Finally, there is mixed sleep apnea, which speaks for itself. Mixed sleep apnea is a combination of obstructive and central sleep apnea. It is not known what triggers the other, and some believe that obstructive apnea can cause excessive breathing, which causes the carbon dioxide levels to become abnormally low and this, in turn, triggers a central nervous response which stops to breathe. Others believe that it is a kind of fundamental nervous system problem that creates the obstruction that causes obstructive apnea.
As you can see from the different types of apnea described, it is essential to make sure that you are correctly diagnosed in order to receive the right treatment. This can be a massive relief for people who suffer from lack of sleep and who have exhausted all the remedies for insomnia, to be diagnosed with a medical condition that can be treated and allow them to get a good night’s sleep.
