Pace to breathe — New treatments for sleep apnea

Sleep apnea is a common condition. As many as 26% of all Americans may suffer from this condition, in which there are long pauses between breaths during sleep. Unfortunately, many patients with sleep apnea do not tolerate the most effective current therapy, continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP. For some of these people, a new approach pacemaker therapy may be an alternative. Pacemakers for sleep apnea? This must be a “typo,” right? Don’t you really mean heart pacemaker? No, this isn’t a typo. Pacemakers are some of the newest treatments for sleep apnea. Before explaining how they work, a short physiology lesson is necessary. Normally, when you breathe in, air flows from the nose and mouth, past the back of your tongue, through the trachea and down into your lungs. This occurs because nerve signals from the brain activate the diaphragm to produce inspiration. The resulting negative pressure pulls air in. However, these nerve signals also stimulate muscles surrounding the throat, including the tongue to contract in order to prevent the airway from being suctioned closed with breathing. Sleep apnea occurs when these processes fail during sleep, and consequently air does not enter the lungs. There are two types of sleep apnea. The most common is obstructive sleep apnea, which occurs when there is repetitive collapse of airway at the back of the throat. In obstructive apnea, the stimulus to the throat muscles is insufficient to prevent their collapse and the airwa...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Behavioral Health Sleep Source Type: news