How Positional Sleep Apnea Affects Your Health?

Sleep apnea is a medical condition that affects 100,000 people every year in the USA. This can lead to severe medical problems. In order to improve quality of life, it is necessary to understand the symptoms of sleep apnea and visit a sleep clinic in OKC.

What's Sleep Apnea?

Sleep apnea causes people to stop breathing completely or to take very low breathe while sleeping. Some patients will find that they only stop breathing once a night, but others may stop breathing more than ten times an hour. Often in the middle of the night, this condition causes the individual to wake up suddenly, or to snorkel around so loudly.

Sleep apnea has other side effects such as failure to sleep, daytime exhaustion, frequent changes of mood due to lack of sleep, headaches, severe snoring, and depression. This condition, however, varies greatly from person to person.

Positional Obstructive Sleep Apnea

The AHI or apnea-hypopnea index is a key term to understand when it comes to sleep apnea. The severity of a single sleep apnea case is referred to here. Apnea means the gaps in respiratory experiences of individuals, and hypopnea is the term used when an individual has very shallow or incomplete breaths.

Supine sleep is where the individual lies on his back and is turned upside down with his chest and face, whereas sensitive sleep means lying on the stomach with his face downwards and the torso downwards.

Positional OSA is a type of OSA in which the Apnea / Hypopnea Index (AHI) is two times the supine level compared to unfriendly sleep. Positional sleep apnea can occur simply if patients are not sleeping on their back and are able to enhance their overall respiration and sleep quality.

Positional and Obstructive Sleep Apnea Link

Often, obstructive sleep apnea is positional sleep apnea in reality. Sleep apnea is positional when a person has breathing events two times more on his or her back compared with on his or her side. Most people notice that the breathing stop event depends on their sleeping position.

The good news is that you can take immediate steps to cut down the impact of your sleep apnea position. Research indicates that your position or posture to sleep is a factor in sleep apnea events. Many studies have said that side sleep cuts down the frequency of a person stops respiring, in particular when compared to back sleep.

Sleeping on the back is typically associated with a deterioration of blocking sleep apnea because of the increased pressure on your throat, particularly with your head in a face-up position. Moreover, there are several other factors which can contribute to the apnea of sleep.

Sleeping Positions

As stated, the position that a person sleeps in can assist or obstruct the probability that they will keep their airways open during sleep. There are several products on the market for positional sleep apnea therapy that can help the person sleeping by coaxing him on his side and preventing him from sleeping on his back.

Neck Positions

Certain neck features are inherited. For example, some people of course have a closer airway, or some size tonsils or adenoids that block breathing if they lie on their backs. Men with more than 17 inches of the neck have a higher risk and female with more than 15 inches of circumference also see an increase in sleep apnea. A long neck can also add to an airway that is more likely during sleep to collapse.

Contact us at OKOA for sleep clinic in OKC. For other issues like ENT problems, allergy, visit our clinic.

**Disclaimer: The information on this page is not intended to be a doctor's advice, nor does it create any form of patient-doctor relationship.