The Many Problems of Sleep Apnea

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Sleep breathing disorders affect your quality of sleep, and the most common one is called sleep apnea. Sleep apnea has many symptoms, including tiredness, snoring, and halted breathing during sleep. It can also cause more dangerous issues like various heart diseases and causes chronic sleep deprivation. To reduce the risk of health complications, there are some very effective options for treatment.

Even though it is a sleeping condition, sleep apnea has an effect on many areas of your life. Since your body uses sleep to restore itself after the previous day’s efforts. Your brain uses this time to clean out the waste materials it produced through the work of the previous day. A sleep disorder such as sleep apnea disrupts that cleaning by disrupting your sleep.

A sleep disorder like sleep apnea also causes sleep deprivation, which causes many more issues than you might imagine. It causes over 100 billion dollars of loss from workplace accidents, increased healthcare costs, production loss, and vehicle crashes. Additionally, family life and social life are both affected negatively. Sleep apnea also raises the chances for increased family problems and even divorce.

Since so many of these issues caused by sleep apnea negatively affect your quality of life, it is incredibly important to treat it properly. A Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine, or CPAP, is the most effective and most common treatment for sleep apnea. A dental appliance that pulls the jaw forward can also open the airway, and surgery is an option for cases that can’t be treated with other options.

To learn more about sleep apnea and what we can do to treat it, please contact Lawrence Zabner, DMD in Toluca Lake, California, for a consultation with him.