What is sleep apnea and does it have anything to do with snoring?
Sleep apnea is a more or less prolonged and abnormal interruption of breathing during sleep. The patient stops breathing or decreases the intensity of his breathing, in which case we no longer speak of apnea but hypoapnea, and suffering from it causes a series of symptoms usually more daytime than nighttime. The most important nocturnal symptom is precisely snoring and in this sense I would say that all patients with apnea are snorers although it is also true that not all snorers have apnea. The more intense the snoring the more likely that the person suffers from sleep apnea. They are two very interrelated processes, apnea always goes with snoring, snoring does not always go with apnea.
Which people are prone and how do they find out?
The main factor for a person to suffer from sleep apneas is overweight, which can range from being slightly overweight to outright obesity. The more obese the more chances of suffering from apneas, and it also has to do with weight distribution which is mostly with fat in the upper part of the body and increased abdominal diameter. Independently of this there are other factors such as the small development of the jaw, an important factor also in adults, and in children it would be necessary to take into account the hypertrophy of tonsils and hypertrophy of the adenoids. In adults there are also other factors such as nasal obstruction due to rhinitis, etc… but generally combined with some of the other factors I have mentioned. The person who suffers from sleep apneas does not realize it during the night, they are generally the people who accompany them as the couple, parents, siblings, cohabitants of the same house.
What happens if the patient is not treated?
It depends on the severity of the sleep apnea problem. It must be clear that no one dies of apnea, it is not possible and many patients ask this question. In general the damage is an accumulated damage and the first symptom may be drowsiness, these people often or can fall asleep very easily and this carries a danger, for example a traffic accident, so it should be taken into account as an immediate danger. And as a cumulative danger, as a number of disorders occur during the night, generally patients are hypertensive or may be hypertensive, with all the consequences of high blood pressure. They are also more prone to some cardiovascular complications. These patients decrease their oxygen saturation during the night, I always tell them that it is as if they were climbing Everest during the night, so they suffer a series of alterations in the organism that in the long term, accumulated, produce cardiovascular, neurological, mood, somnolence disorders, etc….