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Do you feel sleepy while driving or watching TV?
Do you wake up in the morning tired, sleepless and with a headache as if you haven't slept at all?
Do you have a decrease in sexual desire and potency?
Is your blood pressure rising and you can't get it under control?
Have you lost your attention or are you having trouble concentrating?
Attention! You may have a sleep apnea problem.
Snoring is a social and medical problem that seriously affects harmony and happiness in the family. Apnea, or sleep apnea, is a serious clinical condition that affects all organ systems, leaving the person without oxygen. Patients with sleep apnea are more likely to develop diabetes, asthma, stroke, heart and blood pressure diseases. Even sudden death in sleep, albeit rare, may occur.
If a person's breathing has stopped for 5 or more times in a 1-hour sleep period, at least 10 seconds each time, it is possible to talk about sleep apnea in that person. Apnea can be seen in diseases affecting the respiratory center in the brain, as well as in cases of obstruction that prevents the passage of air in the upper respiratory tract (nasal bone curvature, sagging-growth of the soft palate and uvula, large tonsils-nasal flesh, backward escape of the tongue root, etc.) as the collapsed closure of air ways. In the case of sleep apnea, although breathing stops, the effort to breathe again continues, and the increased carbon dioxide rate in the blood stimulates the brain, causing a noisy breathing again, and this cycle continues throughout the entire sleep.
Excess weight, obesity, short neck, smoking, alcohol, allergy-depression drugs and extreme fatigue are the leading causes that increase apnea and snoring. One of the gold standards in the diagnosis and treatment of snoring and/or apnea is the “sleep test/polysomnography” test. The test is based on the measurement of brain waves, eye movements, airflow from the mouth and nose, snoring, heart rate, leg movements and oxygen levels during sleep. For this test, the patients are taken to the sleeping room and hospitalized. During the test, the signals received with cables connected to various parts of the body are transferred to the host computer outside the room, either wired or wirelessly. By examining these records taken until the morning, the severity of the disease is revealed by examining many parameters such as how many times and for how long breathing stops during sleep, how much blood oxygen level drops during apnea, and whether or not to fall into a deep sleep, and it is decided which way to be preferred in the treatment.
Treatment varies according to the severity of the disease. The surgical and non-surgical methods applied are specific for each patient. Although many methods are used in surgery, the main purpose is to remove the obstructing anatomical structure and to prevent inward collapse of the airway. For this purpose, operations for the nose, tonsils, uvula, tongue root, soft palate and chin are performed.
Among non-surgical methods, devices that deliver positive pressure air to the airway known as PAP with the help of a mouth and/or nose mask take the first place. The biggest disadvantage of this method, which has a success rate of up to 95-100 percent, is low patient compliance. Because nearly half of the patients cannot tolerate sleeping with a mask and therefore the positive pressure applied.
Our clinic continues to be with our patients with sleep apnea problems with a wireless sleep test device.
