Sleep apnea is reversible but left untreated, it leads to heart failure and stroke

Regarding sleep apnea, actually it starts with snoring and I know that all of us must be having one family member in our family who used to snore and we used to sometime laugh about it or we ourselves snore and obesity is another thing, which we are witnessing now in our country and all across the globe. We know obesity is now a pandemic all across the world and India is also not far away. Even in children in the schools, it is being noticed that BMI of children are going up and along with that, a disease comes, which is called obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSA) and that disease happens mainly in people who are having more weight or those who are obese and those who have the history of snoring. It happened all across the world and people noted it and medical fraternity noted it and patients were tested, being diagnosed but however as far as India is concerned, there is a lot of, you know, awareness needs to be brought to the general public because usually we laugh at the snoring and though it affects their spouse’s sleep, but we just laugh at it and just go away. We do not worry about it, but it affects our sleep and it has a lot of ill-effects, which changes our metabolism and it led to a lot of other disorders like diabetes, blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, which are irreversible conditions.

Though sleep apnea is a reversible thing, you can control it, you can treat it, you can live a normal life with it, but if we do not treat it, we fail to diagnose it, then it leads to heart failure and stroke and we know these things are irreversible. Once they develop, we can only control them, we can try to bring patients back to usual life but we cannot bring the organ functions back to normal and that’s the importance of knowing about sleep apnea and its management, treatment, and a lot of awareness needs to brought in our country regarding obesity and snoring and its effect on sleep.

Regarding the obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, a lot of advancements have happened over the last few years like diagnostic test is a sleep test, so we have to sleep overnight and usually it is done in the sleep lab, so we have to go to the hospital in the evening by 7 or 8 o’clock, sleep there overnight, and the test automatically records all the findings and in the morning, we just get up and come back, but however, we have to spend one night in the hospital.

Now there are tests available, which can be done at home. They are kind of a screening test. The initial test can be done at home. We can run the test for one day or three days, get the diagnosis, and if the diagnosis is confirmed, on the basis of that reporting and recording, doctors can take the decision whether to start treatment or to do further tests to diagnose accurately sleep apnea and then start the treatment, so that is the advancement in diagnosis. Treatment also, there are a lot of advancements now that are better. The treatment of sleep apnea syndrome is actually what happens during sleep, our airways in the pharynx area, in the upper neck, collapse and that is why air flow stops and our oxygen saturation drops and that has the effect on whole body because our body runs on oxygen.

The treatment is a device, which can push air with pressure so that our airways remain open during sleep also. The device is called CPAP, a positive airway pressure ventilation and that comes in multiple forms. So, over the times, new machines have come, which can provide more comfortable treatment to the patients so that has evolved over the time and those, the equipment can be now available in our country also, so to provide better treatment and better quality of life to the patients. Other advancements are still going on. We are still looking for a medication, which can help our patients. We do not have yet a medicine, a tablet to treat this disease.

There are other advancements like mandibular advancement devices. They are the devices, which are put in the mouth, fixed in the mouth during sleep to help patients. However still, the acceptance among patients is not that great. A lot of work needs to be done in that area. Earlier days, some surgeries were being done for this disease, but recurrence rates are high, so still the surgical treatment is not the main treatment. The main treatment is positive airway pressure ventilation therapy, so that is the CPAP or BiPAP is the treatment for OSA at present. Weight loss is an important part of it and we must try to lose weight because it can help us and improve our sleep apnea problem and the study shows that those patients who are using CPAP, there is a very high chance that they can lose more weight than the people who are just trying to lose weight without using CPAP therapy. CPAP helps not only in improving our sleep and also reducing our weight so that we can have a better sleep and sleep apnea syndrome symptoms can be brought down.