- Sleep apnea causes small interruptions in breathing during sleep that makes it difficult to rest.
- This disorder accelerates aging... and treating it reverses it.
- Hypersomnia is deep tiredness that does not go away after sleeping for many hours.
 |
| The dangerous consequence of a common sleep disorder: multiplies the chances of having a traffic accident |
Sleep apnea is the most common sleep-disordered breathing disorder, affecting about 5% of adults (also, the incidence increases with age, so it is especially common among the elderly). It is an often invisible problem, but it can have very serious consequences for the health of those who suffer from it.
2.5 times higher risk than the general population
Taking into account that it is a condition of a respiratory nature, the complications that affect the cardiovascular and respiratory systems are perhaps the most evident. However, since it seriously affects the quality of rest, there may be others that are less obvious. Thus, for example, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine emphasizes that it multiplies the risk of being involved in a traffic accident.
This is explained in an article published in the specialized media Sleep, in which they detail that specifically, the risk of being a driver in a traffic accident in people suffering from obstructive sleep apnea is 2.5 times higher than that of the general population.
To reach this conclusion, the authors compared the cases of car accidents in the driving role of patients with sleep apnea drawn from the Swedish public health system with the general statistics collected by the Swedish register of traffic accidents.
Effective treatment options
The good news is that, as the authors of the study point out, there are effective strategies to avoid the worst effects of obstructive sleep apnea. In particular, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) offers great results in this regard.
In fact, the study estimates that in patients with this disorder who receive this treatment for at least four hours each night, the risk of motor vehicle accidents is reduced by up to 70%. Furthermore, CPAP also minimizes the incidence of other complications such as cardiovascular or mood disorders.
The great difficulty in this sense lies in identifying when the disease is suffered since the person himself does not wake up because of it (rather, the interruptions in breathing by which it is characterized prevent reaching deep states of sleep). To do this, the ideal is for another person to observe who sleeps and identify pauses in breathing or snoring.
If this method is not possible, other symptoms such as dry mouth on waking, morning headache, or daytime hypersomnia may serve as indicators of such a problem.