What is Sleep Apnea ?

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Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition in which the upper airway collapses during sleep causing breathing to stop.  While you are sleeping, the factors that keep your airway open don’t function the same way that they do during the day.

 

The muscles of the airway relax as your body relaxes during sleep and the brain’s control over breathing changes as you sleep.  When the airway collapses, there is an obstruction to the flow of air into your lungs, and you actually stop breathing.  Your body’s reaction to this is to quickly wake you up so that you can take a breath.  This is called a micro-arousal.  In patients with sleep apnea, these arousals can happen 50-100 times per hour – that is sometime more than once per minute !  Having such a disrupted night of sleep, night after night, causes a tremendous amount of daytime sleepiness – plus it can predispose you to high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, stroke and heart attack.