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Sleep apnea is the condition in which people frequently stop breathing at night for a disturbingly long time. Each episode ends in a burst of snoring. Because this occurs many times a night, it can interfere significantly with the brain’s oxygen supply and result in morning headaches, drowsiness, and the need for many naps during the day. Ultimately, high blood pressure, heart failure, and intellectual deterioration may supervene.
This condition is due to laxity and flabbiness of tissues at the back of the throat. When the person is sleeping, this allows the tongue to fall back into the throat and cause choking. A surefire way of curing sleep apnea is to operate and create a false opening into the windpipe (tracheotomy) below the site of blockage. This, however, is disfiguring and renders the patient more than usually prone to serious chest infection.
In a safer operation, loose, redundant tissue at the back of the throat, including the tonsils and part of the soft palate, are removed, making the upper airway larger and not so prone to become blocked during sleep. A recent article in the Archives of Internal Medicine (141:990) supports this method of treating sleep apnea, citing a marked reduction in the number of episodes of sleep apnea that have been reported in adults whose enlarged tonsils were removed.
However, this is a painful operation and every effort should first be made to help the sleep apnea victim by non-operative means. One easy way of doing so is described in the Southern Medical Journal (79:1061). It points out that sleep apnea is like ordinary snoring in that it is unlikely to occur unless the victim sleeps on his back. The trick, then, is to keep the sleeper on his side and stop him from rolling onto his back. This can often be done by sewing a tennis ball onto the back of the victim’s pajama jacket.
One other point to make on the subject of sleep apnea is that sedatives and alcohol tend to aggravate the problem. Therefore avoidance of sedatives and alcohol is important if you are treating this problem.
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