If you are single and living alone, diagnosing sleep apnea may be difficult.
Do you know if you are snoring in sleep? I am sure you don't. You need someone to tell you that.
"Someone" is maybe your bed partner.
Regardless of the situation, you must find out if you have a sleep disorder. Untreated, sleep apnea can evolve in time, worsening over the course of many years, until it presents a real threat to life.
Firstly, I will give you some tips to find if you have a connection with sleep apnea. Then I will teach your partner (if you have one) to identify if you have a symptom of sleep apnea.
If you are single
... and live alone, you need to pay attention to this symptoms:
Sleep apnea and heart problems are very connected. If you don't treat sleep apnea in time, your heart health will be one of the targets. This medical problem can be prevented if sleep apnea is treated correctly.
This sleep symptom is common to people with sleep apnea, when they sleep too much. "Maybe I am getting old..." you'll think. It's not normal to sleep at weddings, at sport events, at work, or at wheel while driving. This symptom may help in diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea.
morning headaches, short term memory and poor concentration
If you have sleep apnea, not enough air enter into your lungs during sleep. The amount of oxygen in your blood decreases. With low blood oxygen level, your brain is affected. The brain will release stress hormones that will raise you blood pressure, risk of heart attack, stroke and irregular heart rhythm.
You don't need a partner to tell you that you are fat. You can see yourself in the mirror. Obesity is very common among people with sleep apnea.
But not everyone who has sleep apnea is necessarily overweight.
A thick neck with a lot of fat can obstruct your airway. For example, men and women with large neck size: 17 inches or more for men, 16 inches or more for women, are in danger to manifest sleep apnea symptoms.
If your partner has irregular snoring, with breathing that stops briefly, with struggle to breathe...then you must be careful. This is a common symptoms of sleep apnea.
Apnea snoring is noisy and powerful. You may suspect sleep apnea if these symptoms are present, but diagnosing sleep apnea must be confirmed with an apnea monitor or sleep monitor. This monitor will reveal pauses in breathing, sleep arousals and low blood oxygen level.
A normal person has irregular breathing at certain times during sleep. But a person with sleep apnea stops breathing entirely and may hold his breath for at least 10 seconds. And it may happen more than 5 times during a sleep to a couple of hundreds!
The most strange thing is that your partner is not aware of such effort of breathing.
These are the first symptoms that you should give a thought.
There are many other symptoms to help diagnosing sleep apnea. For more information about
symptoms click here.
