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Conquer
Snoring and Sleep Apnea Once and For All - Weird Snoring and Happiness Leven
Connection
If
you snore loudly, you probably have hidden (or diagnosed) sleep apnea.
People
with sleep apnea tend to be more depressed and anxious than
non-sufferers, especially if they also happen to have cardiovascular disease.
That
connection made a team of researchers curious, so they decided to find out
whether sleep apnea treatment in the form of continuous positive
airway pressure (CPAP) could help reduce the symptoms of depression and anxiety.
As
explained in the Journal EClinicalMedicine, the researchers originally found
this question interesting because of two facts:
Heart disease makes you more likely to be depressed. In
fact, research shows that people who have had a stroke or heart attack are up to three times more likely to
develop clinical depression which, in turn, increases their risk of future heart attacks and strokes.
Up
to 50 percent of people with cardiovascular disease also have sleep apnea.
This
made treating the sleep apnea look like a ‘quick fix’ for cardiovascular disease patients, because this would help
their depressive symptoms, which in turn would improve their heart health.
They
got medical information for 2,687 people who had enrolled in the Sleep Apnea
Cardiovascular Endpoints (SAVE) trial. These were all sleep apnea patients who also had cardiovascular disease.
Of
these, they selected 2,410 subjects for their study who had moderate or severe sleep apnea together with their cardiovascular disease. They were followed for 3.7 years.
Some
of the subjects had undergone CPAP treatment but most had not.
The
CPAP group had reduced depression symptoms, with the largest benefit seen in the
group that started off with the most severe depression. Results were seen by the sixth month, and they
were maintained until the end of the study.
CPAP
didn’t help with anxiety scores, though.
After
completing their own study, the researchers reviewed other literature, finding
20 trials on the same subject with 4,255 participants altogether.
These
trials backed their conclusion that CPAP was an effective treatment for depression in people with sleep apnea.
Conquer
Snoring and Sleep Apnea Once and For All - Can You Blame Your Parents for Your
Sleep Apnea?
Sleep apnea is a destructive disorder that causes daytime
sleepiness, dementia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and even early death.
Given
its severity, it is important to know how much it’s preventable through
behavior change and how much of it is already in our genes.
A
new study in the journal Respiratory Research sheds some light on this with a
detailed analysis.
Good
news is, you can still easily cure it.
Lots
of things point to genetically inherited reasons for sleep apnea. It’s more common in people whose upper airways
are small, have weak muscles, accumulate fat, and so on. Like other physical
characteristics, these might be inherited from our parents.
The
authors of the new study recruited 71 twin pairs (142 people) who were on the
Hungarian Twin registry. 48 of the pairs were identical (monozygotic) and 23
fraternal (dizygotic).
There
is a good reason why researchers use twins for these types of studies.
Fraternal
twins and other siblings tend to share only 50 percent of their genes. This
makes it difficult to work out which of their characteristics are due to their
shared family environment and which are due to their genes.
But
identical twins share 100 percent of their genes, so any differences between
them are more likely to be because of environmental influences.
This
means that, if identical twins are similar in some way, it’s going to be
because of their genes, rather than their environment.
The
twins (average age 51) were asked to sleep in the laboratory to test for sleep apnea.
The
scientists used this information to score them on the apnea hypopnea index, which measures periods of shallow
breathing, breathing pauses, and blood oxygen levels.
They
were also given a questionnaire to test their level of daytime sleepiness.
41
percent of their subjects had sleep apnea, and they found that it was highly genetically
influenced.
Between
69 and 83 percent of their scores on the apnea hypopnea index, the respiratory disturbance index,
and the oxygen desaturation index were genetically determined.
Their
unique, unshared environments contributed the other 17 to 31 percent.
When
they experienced more than five apnea or hypopnea events per hour, this was 73 percent
determined by their genes.
Daytime
sleepiness was a lot less common than most people think and those with and
without sleep apnea did not differ much.
The
scientists concluded that daytime sleepiness was mostly caused by environmental
factors, with genes contributing only 34 percent to it.
The
authors speculated that the environmental factors causing daytime sleepiness
were probably things like poor sleep hygiene, irregular work shifts, diets, and
medications.
This
means that you can blame your
parents for having sleep apnea, but you’ve only got yourself to blame if you do
nothing about it.
Conquer
Snoring and Sleep Apnea Once and For All - The Effects of Snoring on Your Age
It
sounds odd, but your body might be quite a lot older or younger than your
birthday is telling you.
That’s
because your biological age is not the same as your chronological age. Your
biological age is the measurement of how healthy your cells are.
You
probably know this already because you’ve met people who look 10 years younger
than their age says they should and others who look much older, and this is one
reason why.
It’s
clear that if someone eats a healthy diet, avoids stress, stays happy and
exercises regularly, their body is likely to be younger where it counts, down
at the cellular level. They look younger because their cells have aged more
slowly.
Now
it seems that when you say you need your beauty sleep you could be onto
something. A study in the journal Sleep suggests that snoring and
sleep-disordered breathing like sleep apnea can age our bodies faster.
They
reached this conclusion after studying 622 adults with an average age of 68.7,
just over half of whom were female.
The
two best DNA tests available were used to check their subject’s biological age,
and a home-based polysomnography, or sleep test, measured how many times an
hour they stopped breathing or woke up (called the arousal index).
The
results were startling. The bodies of people with the sleep-disordered
breathing were at least 215 days older than their chronological age.
Those
with severe sleep apnea were biologically more than 1,000 days older!
Those
who woke up many times were biologically at least 321 days older than their
chronological age, and those who woke up the most were about 1,500 days older.
It
seems unfair, but women seemed to have it worse. They aged faster than men who
also have sleep apnea.
This
is interesting, as most previous studies (apart from just one) have put it the
other way around.
In
a 2017 edition of the journal Trends in Molecular Medicine, scientists weren’t
counting in terms of days lost so much as damage done to our cells.
In
sleep apnea sufferers, they found exactly those same changes in cells and
molecules that previous studies had linked with the aging process.
Both
these studies build on several previous ones that showed how sleep deprivation
leads to accelerated biological aging, and if the new study is correct, the
lack of breathing together with the constant half-waking during the night can
shorten your life expectancy by between one and a half and seven years.
For
more ideas to conquer snoring and sleep apnea once and for all, watch this
video - A Simple Fix For Snoring And Sleep Apnea
The Stop Snoring and Sleep Apnea Program
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Snoring is not only disruptive to our partners, but it poses health risks as
well, especially for people who suffer from sleep apnea.
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