If you or your partner bed are concerned that you may have sleep apnea, see your doctor immediately. Left untreated, sleep apnea can be very serious consequences for your health. Your doctor will diagnose sleep apnea on the basis of a thorough medical history, physical examination, and sleep studies.
Your doctor need to know about the history of your family and how you sleep at night and function in the course of the day. He or she will want to know about your snoring-how loud it is, how often you snore, and if your snoring is interrupted by periods of silence, followed by a gasping noise or swallowed. Your bed is the best person to describe your snoring pattern, so that you can make an appointment that both attend.
Before You can check your order, keep a sleep diary, recording how much and how well you sleep and how They are tired of the following days. Ask your bed partner to evaluate how strong is your snoring every night, as well.
Your doctor will examine your mouth and throat, in the search for enlarged tissue, which may hinder your airway when you relax and sleep. This can suppositories-the soft tissue, dangling in the back of your mouth and the soft palate-the rear part of the roof of your mouth, behind the hard bony palate.
Depending on the results of the examination and your history, your doctor can help you to a sleep specialist for further tests. Doctors who are experts in the treatment of sleep disorders are usually ear, nose, and throat specialists, pulmonologists (lung experts), or neurologists (nerve experts) .
Testing for sleep apnea usually sleep studies. The most accurate test for sleep apnea is polysomnogram. 'Poly' refers to more than one, 'somno "refers to sleep, and' g 'means recording. Learn' polysomnogram ' translates roughly "several recordings of sleep.'
That If, in fact, what happened. This test records the electrical activity in brain, and the movement of the eyes and other muscle activity, your breathing and heart rate, the amount of air that moves and is in your lungs, and the amount of oxygen in the blood. Sensors on the scalp, face, chest, limbs, fingers and all this while you sleep sleeping in a center or sleep lab, which are usually part of a hospital.
Another test, which can be used before a polysomnogram Oximetry. "Oxy" refers to oxygen, and "metry" measurement. So Oximetry measures your blood oxygen levels. They wear a sensor on your finger while you sleep in your own home, and your blood oxygen level, the whole night through. If you have sleep apnea, it is every time you drop stop breathing and wakes up again, as you do your brain again.
If you are diagnosed with sleep apnea, you can also a number of other tests to see if you any of the complications of this disease. These can include an electrocardiogram and blood tests.
Obviously when considering a treatment for sleep apnea, it is necessary to consult your doctor to decide ad with him /her an appropriate course of action.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mitchell_Davidson
1 comments:
Hi,
I am a Melbourne-based Australian doctor and my specialty is nutritional medicine. I recently came across your article on sleep apnea and read it with some interest.
For what it is worth, by way of comment I have enclosed a copy of an article on sleep apnea which I recently had published. It may be of some use to your readers.
Obstructive Sleep Apnea - the not-so-silent assassin
Obstructive Sleep Apnea (or O.S.A. for short) is about as bad as it gets. People may joke about it, but O.S.A. is certainly no laughing matter because it can kill you. And according to the Mayo Clinic, up to 1 in 4 Americans suffer from this deadly health concern. Now this is a really worrying statistic to say the least.
Unfortunately O.S.A. sufferers can be totally unaware of their condition until their sleeping partner or someone who sleeps within ear shot tells them. If this sounds like you, the only indicator that you may notice is feeling tired all the time during the day.
So what exactly is O.S.A.? It refers to a snoring complication where breathing totally stops during sleep for a period of 20 seconds or more. You can experience up to 300 of these apniac events each night. They severely reduce your body’s ability to oxygenate your blood, forcing your heart to pump harder than it should to maintain equilibrium.
Prolonged nightly apniac events can then cause an enlargement of your heart, with the probability of associated cardio-vascular disorders such as high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke and irregular heart beat.
And what causes O.S.A.? It occurs when your tongue, uvula and soft palate collapse into the back of your throat when you sleep, blocking your airways so you can’t breath. As your airways narrow even further, you start to snore loudly, then your body violently gasps for air as breathing totally stops, and your nightly dice with death continues as the cycle repeats itself. No wonder O.S.A. sufferers wake feeling absolutely exhausted!
Most at risk are unfit, middle aged, overweight males who have a thick neck and pot belly. They often have a family history of the condition and may have a sluggish thyroid.
Now the good news is that O.S.A. is a manageable condition. If you feel that you do suffer from this worrying health concern, have it checked out first to determine if you need to use a CPAP breathing machine, then look at your diet and lifestyle choices before you waste time and money on any other stop snoring treatments.
It’s important here to always remember that you are what you eat. Whilst it’s unlikely that dietary and lifestyle changes will totally cure your O.S.A., they certainly have the power to overcome some of the contributing factors that may be causing or worsening your Sleep Apnea so that its incidence and frequency reduces.
Dr Rick Donald is the author of Essential Stop Snoring Secrets. To find out more information about his book, visit http://www.stopmysnoringnow.com/stopsnoring.html
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