Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) occurs when your muscles relax during sleep, allowing soft tissue to collapse and block your airway. This can cause you to stop breathing for anywhere from a few seconds to almost a minute at a time. These breathing pauses are followed by brief awakenings that disturb your sleep – even if you don’t realize it!

Of the estimated 30 million people who have sleep apnea in the US, only 6 million are diagnosed. It is important that you are properly screened and tested by a medical professional to determine if you have some level of sleep-related breathing disorder. Major risk factors include if you are:

• Snoring

• Overweight

• Over 50

• Gasping at night

• Experience excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS)

• Hypertension

• Diabetes

• Atrial fibrillation

Other common symptoms include:

• Waking in the morning feeling unrefreshed

• Being tired during the day

• Morning headaches

• Waking up frequently at night to go to the bathroom

• Difficulty concentrating or remembering things

Much like a blood test (CBC) or urinalysis, a sleep test will give your physician the data and numbers to show what is happening to your body at night. As technology has progressed, home sleep testing (HST) with as low as four channels for data can easily diagnose sleep apnea from the comfort of your own bed. Although HST’s tend to underestimate the severity of disease, most patients can be diagnosed effectively without sleeping in a lab setting.

Snoring is an indication that your airway is being limited at night. Primary snoring is only disruptive to your spouse or others in your vicinity but, if your airway is being limited in such a way that your oxygen is dipping and your sleep cycle is getting disrupted, the eventual toll on your health, life, and quality of life can be surprisingly detrimental. Undiagnosed sleep apnea increases your likelihood of dying in the next 20 years by 40% (mild OSA) up to 280% (severe OSA), according to a Wisconsin cohort study. A Yale School of Medicine study found that sleep apnea can increase your chances of having a heart attack or dying by 30% over four to five years.

A diagnosis of “mild” sleep apnea still carries with it a variety of health implications. Not to mention the effects on quality of life due to lack of quality sleep: alertness, energy level, relationship discord due to snoring, mood, productivity, and memory issues. Studies have also shown that on average, the severity of sleep apnea increases by 20% every five years due to many changes attributed to aging.