It’s estimated sleep apnoea affects over 1.5 million adults in the UK, yet due to the nature of the condition, up to 85 per cent of people are undiagnosed.
Sleep apnoea can significantly affect sleep quality, causing extreme daytime sleepiness, and in more severe cases is associated with serious medical conditions, including high blood pressure and depression.
Experts warn it’s important to know if you have the sleep disorder and get treatment if necessary. Here’s everything you need to know about the condition.
What is sleep apnoea?
Sleep apnoea is a relatively common sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep. It is typically characterised by heavy snoring followed by periods of silence, gasping and sometimes choking sounds.
There are four main types of sleep apnoea but the most common is obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), where the upper airway is narrow or has become blocked.
To be clinically considered obstructive sleep apnoea, the pauses in breathing need to last for more than 10 seconds each time and happen five times or more every hour. In severe cases, these pauses can happen several hundred times each night, and have a significant impact on quality of life.
Dr David Garley, sleep expert and clinic director at The Better Sleep Clinic, explains why this happens: “Parts of your upper airway are held in place by muscles and as anyone falls asleep these muscles relax, which causes your airway to naturally narrow in slightly. The air flow can become turbulent which makes the soft structures in the throat vibrate, which we hear as snoring.
“But with cases of sleep apnoea, the airway actually closes and there’s a pause in breathing. Your body can only tolerate this for so long before it has to pull you back from these deep states of sleep to lighter stages, or wake you up – so your airway muscles regain their strength, pull open your airway and you can start breathing again, and this is when you often hear a choking, gasping sound.”
This can have a profound impact on your quality of sleep and overall feeling of restfulness. “It means you can struggle to get into the deeper states of sleep that are much more restorative, because whenever you do, your airway closes, you stop breathing and your body has to wake you up,” Dr Garley says. “Sleep can become extremely fragmented and poor, meaning even if you sleep for 10 hours, you wake up feeling unrefreshed and excessively sleepy during the day.”
Who is most susceptible to sleep apnoea?
“Obstructive sleep apnoea can impact both children and adults, though it becomes more common with age, particularly between the ages of 40 and 60,” says Dr Chris Turnbull, medical adviser to the Sleep Apnoea Trust. “It is more common in males, but there is increased risk in females after the menopause.” Lower levels of oestrogen and progesterone can reduce muscle tone in the throat, he explains.
Anybody can develop obstructive sleep apnoea, though certain risk factors may make you more susceptible to the condition, Dr Garley points out. Weight is the main modifiable risk factor, particularly around the neck. “If you are carrying extra weight or even just have a lot of muscle around the neck, this can all push in on your airway and make it narrower.
If you smoke or have any airway allergies such as hay fever then this can cause the airway to become inflamed and slightly swollen, which can make the airway narrower and make sleep apnoea more likely. Also alcohol and some sedating medications can mean that the airway muscles that hold the airway open can become weaker and this can make sleep apnoea worse.”
Recent research found the severity of obstructive sleep apnoea increases at the weekend, potentially due to lifestyle factors such as more drinking and smoking, as well as irregular sleep patterns, which may exacerbate the condition, a phenomena the researchers termed “social apnoea”.
You can still get obstructive sleep apnoea even if you meet none of the main risk factors, says Dr Garley, “because often it is just related to the shape of your airway, and some airways are just narrower than others. So if you are young with a normal body mass index (BMI) then you can still have obstructive sleep apnoea and we have a lot of such patients in our clinic. Some children can also get obstructive sleep apnoea and often this relates to having big tonsils in an airway that is still quite small. That said, the two most important risk factors are increasing age and a higher BMI.”
How to know if you have sleep apnoea
Most symptoms of sleep apnoea, such as snoring, pauses in breathing and choking or gasping, happen when you are asleep. “This is one of the reasons why 85 per cent of people with sleep apnoea are undiagnosed,” Dr Garley notes. “If you have a bed partner who reports these nighttime symptoms then this can be a really helpful thing to know. During the day the symptoms of obstructive sleep apnoea are primarily excessive daytime sleepiness, but also difficulty focusing and concentrating, poor memory and often depression.”
Both the Sleep Apnoea Trust and British Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association offer online resources which can help assess your risk. These include the Epworth Sleepiness Scale questionnaire, which measures how sleepy you are.
Another is the Stop Bang questionnaire, which uses an acronym to assess your risk for obstructive sleep apnoea. It asks the following: S—snoring: do you snore loudly? T—tired: do you feel tired, sleepy during waking hours? O—observed: has anyone observed you stop breathing during sleep? P—blood pressure: are you being treated or have you been treated for hypertension? B—BMI: is your BMI higher than 35? A—age: are you aged 50 or older? N—neck: is your neck circumference greater than 40cm (16in)? G—gender: are you male?
If you answer yes to three or more of these questions, you are at risk of having obstructive sleep apnoea. It’s important to consult your GP if you have concerns.
“The best way to get sleep apnoea investigated is through a home sleep test,” Dr Garley says. “This is a watch-like device that you wear for one night that takes extremely detailed measurements that are very different to the kind of measurements taken by wearable tech devices. This has largely replaced the need to go into hospital for inpatient sleep studies to get OSA diagnosed.”
Is sleep apnoea dangerous?
Obstructive sleep apnoea causes dips in blood oxygen levels overnight, and people with the most severe dips in blood oxygen levels are at risk of serious health conditions like high blood pressure, explains Dr Turnbull. “Left untreated, this increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.”
Sleep apnoea is associated with high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, diabetes as well as depression, says Dr Garley. But it’s also dangerous because it causes excessive daytime sleepiness. “The main risk here is with driving – one in five road traffic accidents are related to poor sleep.”
How to treat sleep apnoea
Fortunately, sleep apnoea is a treatable condition. Lifestyle changes such as quitting smoking, losing excess weight and reducing your alcohol intake can have a meaningful effect, Dr Garley says.
Other solutions include dental devices have been found to improve snoring and some of the milder forms of sleep apnoea. “These are a bit like sports gum shields but with a section for the lower teeth that clips together which can help bring your lower jaw forwards by a few millimetres creating a bit of extra space in the airway behind the tongue,” explains Dr Garley.
Changing sleep positions can help some people, too. “Some find their sleep apnoea only really occurs when they sleep on their back because in this position the airway is naturally more narrow,” Dr Garley says. “So finding some ways to sleep on your side for most of the night, such as using triangular shaped pillows to prop yourself in position, or sewing a tennis ball into the back of your pyjamas to prevent you from sleeping on your back can sometimes help.”
The gold standard treatment is called CPAP, which stands for continuous positive airway pressure. “This is a small box like device that sits on your bedside table and blows air at a low pressure through a mask that sits either over your nose or over your mouth and nose and this gentle pressure holds your airway open from the inside,” he continues.
As well as operations on the back of the throat, adds Dr Turnbull, there are now surgical implants that stimulate a nerve in the neck to activate the tongue opening the upper airway, “but these are not always effective”, he says. “As with surgery on the throat, surgical implants should only be used after other options have been tried.” A pill to stop snoring and sleep apnoea may be on the horizon.
As with all medical conditions, if you suspect you may have a form of sleep apnoea, the first port of call should be to discuss with your GP, who can decide whether further investigation or treatment is necessary.
Your next read
square SAVING AND BANKINGHow I Manage My Money: Mum, on £2,000 a month in benefits, after caring for elderly parent
square LIFESTYLEI was sick for 20 years and got no answers. German doctors diagnosed me in weeks
square TRAVELMy affordable winter sun escape with great food, a sleeper train and historic cities
square SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDSI’m a SEND expert. Here’s why teachers will quit after ‘four tier’ rules
Hence then, the article about the red flags for sleep apnoea and what to do if you spot them was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The red flags for sleep apnoea – and what to do if you spot them )
Also on site :