Sleep apnea is a medical sleep disorder where you stop breathing for short periods (10 seconds or longer) throughout the night. When you stop breathing, your brain eventually rouses your body and you wake up. This results in you getting a poor night's rest because you wake up so many times during the night.
There are three types of sleep apnea:
These sleep apneas have many negative side effects, most notably:
Let's look at obstructive sleep apnea vs. central sleep apnea in more detail.
Obstructive sleep apnea is the most common type of sleep apnea. It is caused when something obstructs your breathing airway, namely when the muscles in the back of your throat relax and your tongue presses against the back of your pallet. In fact, you can even simulate this if you try and relax the back of your tongue, press it up against the back of your throat, and breath in.
There are others, as you can see in the image to the right.
The following are key factors that can cause contribute to OSA:
Like central and common sleep apneas, obstructive sleep apneas is often treated with BiPAP and CPAP machines, though surgery and oral appliances are also sometimes used depending on the treatment course recommended by your doctor.
Central sleep apnea is also a sleep disorder where you stop breathing at night because the brain doesn't send proper signals to the muscles that control your breathing. This is contrasted with obstructive sleep apnea, which is caused by an actual physical obstruction (i.e., tongue/throat/tonsils).
Unlike OSA, where snoring may be present, central sleep apnea does not involve snoring. There is no respiratory effort, differentiating it from OSA. However, intermittent pauses during sleep are a key indicator for sleep apnea. Other symptoms are similar to OSA and include:
There also may be underlying conditions that cause this type of sleep apnea, such as:
Usually, diagnosing and treating underlying conditions is the first step for treating CSA. If such intervention does not effectively treat CSA, then CPAP and BiPAP machines are extremely popular choices for CSA treatment.
Fortunately, identifying and diagnosing these sleep apneas is straightforward. Your doctor may give you a referral to spend the night at a sleep center (often covered by insurance), where you will be evaluated with a scale (called apnea-hypopnea index or AHI) that will aid your doctor establish a diagnosis:
Unfortunately, while it is called "mild sleep apnea", it still involves waking up at least dozens of times per night and still comes with the same risks and consequences of severe sleep apnea. Fortunately, CPAP or BiPAP therapy effectively treat sleep apnea.
If you live in Alaska, you can easily click below to get started with a free consultation with one of our sleep specialists - it should only take about 15 minutes.