Can you die from obstructive sleep apnea? what causes death? is it preventable? what test do you need to have run on you?

Obstructive : Obstructive sleep apnea is a chronic condition that is tough on your body. It happens when your airway closes off as you sleep causing disrupted sleep, snoring and fatigue and sleepiness the next day. Osa causes early mortality due to the chronic low oxygen levels at night and causes heart and lung disease and contributes to memory problems. It is diagnosed in a sleep clinic where you check in at night, sleep in their bed with monitors on your arms, legs , head and chest for the night. If you have obvious osa they will often wake you and put a CPAP device on you to see if it helps you keep your airway open on that same night. Cpap is a device that you wear under your nose or on your face like a mask and it helps put continuous airway pressure to keep your airway from closing. Folks with osa describe feeling tired all the time "like I am walking through mud". They fall asleep at the wheel driving and get high blood pressure. The diagnostic test is easy and just takes one night to help decide if this is a problem for you.

People : People with obstructive sleep apnea have an airway that is more narrow than normal, usually at the nose, back of the nose (nasopharynx), base of the tongue, back of the throat or palate. When the pharyngeal muscles (muscles of the upper throat ) relax, the palate relaxes backwards which can obstruct the airway. Most people have enough space behind the tongue to take a breath without needing to pull the tongue forward. However, when obstructive sleep apnea patients are awake, the tongue needs to be active to pull the base of the tongue forward to open the airway. During deep sleep, most muscles including the tongue muscles relax. Now, most people do not realize we don’t really need a full night sleep to be fully rested the next day. The really important part of sleep is the time we spend during deeper phases of sleep during which our bodies truly gets to relax itself. This part of our sleep may only take a few hours although in order to reach the deeper parts of our nightly sleep, we may require some superficial non relaxing type of sleep patterns. So, if you slept 8 hours one night but spent most of that sleep in a superficial type sleep, you may as well have been up watching your favorite show on tv because the next day you will be as tired. During the deep phase of sleep, also called rapid eye movement (rem) sleep, the muscles completely relax. Patients with obstructive sleep apnea often don't report actually waking up during the night with each episode of apnea. Frequently, during the apnea the brain only partially awakens from a deep sleep (stages 3, 4, or rem) to a shallow level of sleep. When the brain partially awakens to a more superficial phase of sleep, the tongue muscle contracts and pulls the tongue forward so that a breath can be taken. The patient may remain asleep, but the deep sleep that is important to be fully rested the following day is disrupted. Obstructive sleep apnea (osa) may be a risk factor for the development of other medical conditions. High blood pressure (hypertension), heart failure, heart rhythm disturbances, atherosclerotic heart disease, pulmonary hypertension, Insulin resistance, and even death are some of the known complications of untreated obstructive sleep apnea. However, to keep the range of adverse effects of sleep apnea more realistic and perhaps less dramatic, the chances of actually dying from sleep apnea is slim. It is the morbidity, the cumulative ill effect on the body that sleep apnea has which is the reason for selecting to treat it in the first place. The first evaluation of sleep apnea is by obtaining a full history of symptoms to understand the effect sleep apnea may have on various body systems. Also, your doctor can understand the source of apnea whether from direct obstruction of the airway or a problem that occurs in the central nervous system (the brain). A physical examination can reveal a lot of information beginning in the most common cause of sleep apnea which is being overweight (weight loss is directly related to reduction and prevention of sleep apnea) to various factors in the airway beginning with the nose, the nasal passageways, the back of the nose, the palate, the tonsils, the throat, and the width and thickness of the neck. Finally, to objectively assess the severity of sleep apnea, a sleep study or polysomnography is performed whereby you sleep in a room that resembles a hotel with the exception of a multitude of monitors that evaluate your heart rate, blood pressure, audio and video recording of your snoring, apneas, and body movement, recording of brain activity (electrodes), ekg (heart rhythm monitoring) and levels of oxygen in the blood. It is a painless test that is performed overnight. Diagnosis of sleep apnea may warrant treatment with weight loss, medication, a special nighttime oxygen mask (a treatment called cpap) or occasionally surgery to correct anatomical airway obstruction.

Indirectly : Death may come as a result of he sequelae of osa. Hypertension, stroke, and other cardiovascular disease have been shown to result from untreated osa. Whether you are treated with CPAP or surgery either will decrease the probability of death.