About Sleep Apnea
What is Sleep Apnea?
Sleep Apnea is one of the most common sleep disorders in which breathing stops and then restarts again recurrently during sleep.
Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), occurs when the airway temporarily collapses during sleep, preventing or restricting breathing for up to ten seconds or more. OSA patients will commonly suffer from low oxygen levels in the blood, high blood pressure and an overall decrease in the quality of life due to daytime drowsiness and headaches. Breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to minutes. Such events can occur several hundred times a night severely disrupting sleep.
Typically, normal breathing then starts again, sometimes with a loud snort or choking sound. The term “sleep-disordered breathing” (SDB) includes a spectrum of respiratory disorders ranging in severity from snoring to OSA.
Sleep apnea usually is a chronic (ongoing) condition that disrupts your sleep 3 or more nights each week. You often move out of deep sleep and into light sleep when your breathing pauses or becomes shallow.
This results in poor sleep quality that makes you tired during the day. Sleep apnea is one of the leading causes of excessive daytime sleepiness.
Prevalence
Over 40 million Americans suffer from a sleep disorder, and 20 million suffer from OSA. Despite the high prevalence, 93% of women and 82% of men with moderate to severe OSA remain undiagnosed.
Untreated OSA can severely affect quality of life, health and mortality. Clinical research shows that it is linked strongly to a range of serious, even life-threatening, chronic diseases such as stroke, heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, obesity and coronary heart disease.
OSA affects around 20% of the adult population, making it as widespread as diabetes or asthma. However, awareness is low and we believe that about 90% of people who have OSA remain undiagnosed and untreated. Along with an increasing understanding of the morbidity and mortality caused by OSA, this discrepancy has created one of the fastest growing segments of the respiratory industry.
