Sleep Apnea Essay

Words: 748
Pages: 3

Are you restlessness during the night? Do you seem to be consistently tired throughout the day? You could be suffering from sleep apnea syndrome (SAS). SAS is a chronic condition where, during your sleep, you may periodically stop breathing for a matter of seconds or minutes. These periods of interrupted breathing, called apnea, or minimal breathing, called hypopnea, occur repeatedly throughout the night and may cause you to wake sporadically, leading to restless nights and daytime sleepiness. SAS is also known to be associated hypoxemia, a condition where the amount of oxygen in the blood decreases to very low levels. Sleep apnea can occur in anyone but it is especially common in the older population. Oftentimes sufferers are unaware that …show more content…
A recent study by Ju et al. (2012), conducted at the sleep laboratory at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, aimed to fill this gap. They accomplished this by looking at cognitively healthy elderly people with and without SAS and compared the cognitive abilities between the two. Specifically, they wanted to determine the outcome of SAS on elderly individuals who are free of any cognitive impairment and therefore those with dementia or any other cognitive disorders were not involved in this …show more content…
AHI is a measure of how many times in one hour a person stops breathing or has shallow breathing during sleep. In order to determine AHI, a nocturnal polysomnography, or sleep test was conducted. They also used the sleep test to determine oxygen desaturation index (ODI) which is the found by looking at how many times during one hour of sleep the body’s oxygen levels are lowered by 4% or more. Following the sleep test, participants were assessed for their cognitive abilities as well as mood, daytime sleepiness and sleep disturbances through a series of cognitive