Sleep Apnea – Unexpected, Deadly Consequences

If you suffer sleep apnea, you know how being tired during the day can put you and others in danger. You may also know that sleep apnea can cause stroke, heart attack and even dementia.
Sleep Apnea ,Cured My Snoring Unexpected, Deadly Consequences Unexpected, Deadly Consequences

Cured My Snoring . . . Permanently


But a new study reveals more subtle consequences of sleep apnea. And one that’s more fatal than all the others put together.

Fortunately, it also reveals a possible cure for this horrendous disease.

Treatment-resistant depression and suicidal major depressive disorder are two of the worst conditions that you can possibly have, as anyone who has had them will tell you.

A study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research now offers sleep apnea as a possible cause for these conditions, and that link might lead to a solution.

The team behind the research didn’t set out to look at sleep apnea at all. They were interested in whether combining insomnia treatment with depression treatment could reduce suicidal thoughts. But, once research got underway, it struck them that a lot of their subjects with major depression also had sleep apnea.

So, they started a new study. They looked at major depressive disorder sufferers but excluded those who were at risk of sleep apnea, so think people on sleeping tablets, people with obesity and also restless leg syndrome.

But even after excluding people with these risk factors, they still found that 17 of the 125 subjects they tested either in the laboratory or at home had sleep apnea, which makes it 14 percent.

That’s nearly the same as the average occurrence of sleep apnea in the general population, even though the high-risk subjects had been excluded.

So, even though they excluded men who snored, were overweight and felt sleepy during the day, the percentage remained roughly the same. In other words, it was high.

This does not mean that depression causes sleep apnea, or that sleep apnea causes depression, but it does mean that the percentage of sleep apnea sufferers in a population of patients with major depressive disorder with suicidal thoughts is much higher than you might expect.

It’s not known why this happens, but it could be that many cases of major depressive disorder, including treatment-resistant ones (which make up half of all cases), might respond to sleep apnea treatment.

The researchers point out that people with sleep apnea are quite likely to be depressed, too, so depression treatments are unlikely to work for them because their problem is to do with sleep. They don’t have a problem with the neurotransmitters that antidepressants aim to treat, and they don’t have the kind of psychological problem that therapy might be able to help.

This means that if there are lots of hidden cases of sleep apnea among major depressives with suicidal thoughts, it might be better to treat them for sleep apnea than for depression.

Sleep Apnea? Two more Fatal Consequences

By now, we know that people with sleep apnea are more likely than non sufferers to develop heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.

But a study in the new edition of the journal JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery shows a disease caused by sleep apnea. This one is even more serious than any previous ones known.

On the bright side, there is an easy solution for sleep apnea too.

The researchers had access to the medical records of more than 1 million adults from the Korea National Health Insurance Service. From these, they picked 197 sleep apnea sufferers for whom complete records were available. They were all diagnosed between 2004 in 2006.

To match them, they identified 788 people who matched them in age, sex, health conditions, disability, and household income, but who were free from sleep apnea.

None of their subjects had been diagnosed with depression or anxiety by the beginning of the study.
Sleep Apnea Two more Fatal Consequences

 This one is even more serious than any previous ones known


In the next 9 years, people with sleep apnea were 2.9 times more likely to develop depression and 1.75 times more likely to develop anxiety.

This is yet another reason to tackle your sleep apnea as soon as possible.

New Sleep Apnea Risk Factor Is Probably A Condition You Haven’t Heard Of

Smoking, obesity, being male, being older, and/or having upper airway abnormalities all put you in a much higher risk category for sleep apnea; but this is no secret – scientists have known this for quite some time.
Cure even the worst cases of snoring and sleep apnea

Cure even the worst cases of snoring and sleep apnea


But new research, recently published in the journal Frontiers Medicine has added a new cause to the list, and it’s definitely not one that would ever come to mind when thinking about sleep apnea.

Fortunately, you can eliminate this cause, killing two birds with one stone.

Ankylosing spondylitis can now be added to the list (try saying that quickly).

This type of arthritis in the joints causes your spine to become inflamed.

There are huge differences between ankylosing spondylitis and sleep apnea, but researchers continue to dig deeper, as previous studies found a relationship between autoimmune diseases that involve a harmful overreaction of the immune system (like rheumatoid arthritis) and sleep apnea. Spondylitis is another such autoimmune condition.

The research team collected information from about 2,210 people that had been newly diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis from the Longitudinal Health Insurance Research Datasets and compared them to 8,840 healthy people.

They then looked for people who had been newly diagnosed with sleep apnea and then compared the spondylitis and sleep apnea records with each other.

People with newly diagnosed spondylitis were 2.8 times more likely to also be diagnosed with new sleep apnea than the healthy controls were.

During the first 24 months after the initial spondylitis diagnosis the risk was 7.9 times as high; it then dropped to 1.8 times after 24 months.

Men with spondylitis were 4.5 times more likely to develop sleep apnea compared to women, who were 2.7 times more likely to develop it.

The risk was the highest in the 48-59 year old age group and for people with asthma, esophageal disease and hepatitis B.

Ankylosing spondylitis, like other autoimmune conditions, is a risk factor for sleep apnea, so you must keep this in mind if you are ever diagnosed with it.


Sleep Apnea Permanently Destroys One of Your Five Senses

Diabetes and sleep apnea are two conditions that can seriously affect a person’s life and health but imagine having the two.

Sleep apnea is life threatening and so is Type 2 Diabetes.
Sleep Apnea Permanently Destroys One of Your Five Senses

Sleep Apnea Use Cpap


But how about suffering from both conditions, causing you to lose one of your five senses…not temporarily, but permanently?

This shocking danger of sleep apnea and diabetes was revealed in a new study presented at the 123rd Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.

Diabetes causes macular edema and sometimes blindness. It happens because high blood sugar makes the blood vessel walls in your eyes bulge outwards, causing tiny ruptures from which fluid and blood leak into your retinal tissue, resulting in inflammation and swelling in your retina.

Taiwanese scientists analyzed the information of all patients who had been diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy over an 8-year period at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan.

While 45.5 percent of diabetics without macular edema suffered from sleep apnea an incredible 80.6 percent of diabetics with macular edema did, proving a connection between sleep apnea and macular edema.

The studies implied that not only does high blood sugar cause macular edema; it also results in low blood oxygen levels due to breathing pauses.

Researchers have previously shown that sleep apnea causes damage to blood vessels by promoting inflammation and high blood pressure, which means the small blood vessels in diabetics eyes are also damaged by a variety of other cardiovascular factors.

Macular edema is potentially treatable via laser treatments if caught in time.