What Is Sleep Apnea?
Sleep apnea is a potentially dangerous sleep disorder since it restricts the normal breathing pattern during sleep. People suffering from sleep apnea usually do not experience any difficulty in breathing when awake and are mostly not aware of the problem they suffer from. Apnea is specifically defined as a 10 second interval between subsequent breaths that might result in a neurological arousal or basically the brain being aware of the shortcoming. Sleep apnea can be of essentially two forms, and the third type of sleep apnea is a combination of the two.
The most common type of sleep apnea is obstructive sleep apnea, during which the collapsible tissues around the air passages in the throat obstruct the breathing channel and depending on the frequency of apnea, it could cause mild to severe consequences.
Obstrucitve Sleep Apnea occurs when there is an obstruction in the breathing canal that causes difficulty in breathing. It is usually due to the collapsible tissues around the passage, and obstructive sleep apnea is the most common type of apnea, prevalent. This apnea can also have different ranges of severity, and the consequences can thus range in complexity as well. However, breathing difficulty caused by illnesses like respiratory infections do not fall under apnea. Chronic sleep apnea is constant disturbance in normal breathing patterns that can cumulate to become disabling problems.
The other type, central sleep apnea, occurs when the brain basically “forgets” to breathe. In other words, the brain fails to take action against the low levels of oxygen and excess levels of carbon dioxide in the body, and the patient stops to breathe. In central sleep apnea, the brain neglects to react to the low levels of oxygen and in the case where the pause in the breaths is persists long enough; death can result simultaneously with severe sleep apnea.
Complex sleep apnea is a combination of the two types described above. Usually, when a person is suffering from obstructive sleep apnea and is unable to breathe, the brain tends to stop responding and it effectively develops into a case of central sleep apnea even when the obstruction is removed. Hence complex sleep apnea is a resultant of the two types of apnea and can be dangerous if remains undiagnosed.
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