Understanding How Sleep Apnea Impacts Your Overall Health
How does sleep apnea impact your health? Both in a physical and an emotional way. While early symptoms of this disorder include fatigue and daytime drowsiness, if sleep apnea is not treated, more serious complications like heart failure can result. Therefore, it's vital to understand how sleep apnea impacts your health, because this knowledge will help you minimize or eliminate potentially fatal consequences.
How It Hurts Your Heart
The heart suffers when sleep apnea is undiagnosed or left untreated. Sleep apnea causes a person to stop breathing, anywhere from a few seconds to perhaps a full minute. The heart tries to compensate for the resulting increase of carbon dioxide in the body because the breathing has been stopped. The heart will therefore pump harder in an effort to get rid of the carbon dioxide, but this puts an unnatural and dangerous strain on this major organ. High blood pressure is usually the result. Another recent conclusion by medical researchers is a connection between sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation, a condition where the heart valves become weakened and no longer pump blood with the necessary force. Without a doubt, the heart is the first organ to feel the strain caused by sleep apnea, and this sets up potentially fatal consequences for the patient.
Another area in which sleep apnea impacts health is by making you more prone to accidents. Since a person who has sleep apnea wakes up many times during the night, no regular sleep is possible. This results in daytime fatigue, which is often an undisclosed reason for accidents. A lack of restful sleep decreases reflex responses and hand-eye coordination, making a person clumsier and less likely to respond quickly in certain situations.
It's Just Emotions
It's not easy going through a day after being awake most of the night. If sleep apnea is left untreated, depression can result. Feelings of despondency and despair may surround a person, decreasing their quality of life and ability to cope with normal situations such as driving, going to work or taking care of the family.
While sleep apnea impacts the health of a person, it also affects family life. The many episodes of waking in the middle of the night may disturb the sleep of family members. The emotional results of this condition negatively affect relationships, while the serious health aspects are likely to cause alarm for the entire household. This writer hopes that by looking at how sleep apnea impacts your health, you'll finally go to the doctor.
