Sleep apnea is a serious sleep disorder that can severely affect sleep apnea patients’ lives. The sleep apnea complications can include mild symptoms like:

• Irritation
• Sleeplessness
• Tiredness

To severe complications like

• Strokes
• Heart attacks
• High blood pressure.

Sleep apnea patients will usually stop breathing repeatedly through the night. This can happen as many as hundred times, and each time, the patient wakes up to take an emergency breathe even though the person may not remember waking up.

Sleep apnea and hypertension

The effects of sleep apnea can seriously harm your health and can even result in various physical and mental impairments. Sleep apnea patients usually go without proper rest and as such they feel sleepy through the day. Sleep apnea and hypertension are also found to be co related.

It has been estimated that up to 50 percent of sleep apnea patients suffer from hypertension. Though a cause and effect relation between sleep apnea and hypertension has not been established, it is quite certain that sleep apnea contributes to high blood pressure in sleep apnea patients.

Blood pressure reading above 140/90 is considered to be high and if this high pressure goes untreated, there can be serious health risks including kidney failure.

Heart complications in sleep apnea patients

Sleep apnea complications also include a variety of cardiac problems like

• heart failure
• irregular heart beats
• heart attack
• stroke

Arrhythmia, which is a condition with abnormal heart rhythm, is also seen in more than 90 percent of the people who suffer from sleep apnea. Patients can suffer from –

• long pauses between beats
• abnormal slowing of the heart
• few extra beats and other similar abnormalities

A fatal arrhythmia can suddenly cause death, while the patient is asleep.

Depression

Lack of sleep that is associated with sleep apnea can result in severe depression in sleep apnea patients. Some of the symptoms of depression are feelings of:

• guilt
• worthlessness
• helplessness

Remember that depression is a serious issue that is not just like a mere mood swing. It is much more serious and it interferes with the normal functioning of the patient’s everyday life.

Depression will cause pain and suffering not only to the patient, but also to the people around him. It has been found that people with sleep apnea are five times more likely to get into depression that people who do not suffer from this syndrome.

Oxygen deprivation

Sleep apnea patients suffer from oxygen deprivation in their bodies. This is because in sleep apnea, the patient stops breathing and his body do not get enough oxygen. There are a number of serious health issues that can emanate from oxygen deprivation, including:

• memory problems
• learning disorder
• irritability
• sexual dysfunction

Your body needs adequate amount of oxygen to perform all the actions properly. But the moment it cannot get enough oxygen, the whole system is thrown out of control.

Sleep deprivation

One of the most obvious effects of sleep apnea is of course sleep deprivation. Lack of sleep can have serious effects on the health of the patient. Some of the basic effects of lack of sleep are

• poor mental and emotional health
• irritation
• bad memory
• bad hand to eye coordination
• academic underachievement in children and adolescents

It has been found that a number of auto accidents have been caused due to this condition in the patients. Indeed, sleep apnea is a major issue that needs to be treated immediately – for the wellbeing of the patient, as well as his family.

Wake up – literally – to the problem of sleep apnea. There are millions of people in the country who have an increased risk during surgery, simply because they do not even know that they are suffering from sleep apnea. When this condition goes undiagnosed, there can be severe complications while administering pain medications and anesthesia.