Are you sick of feeling exhausted when you wake up? Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from sleep apnea, which is a common sleep disorder. This stops you from breathing while you’re asleep. Although your brain wakes you up enough to breathe, this results in a lack of a good night’s sleep.
Moreover, pauses or short breaths are symptoms of partially or obstructed airways during sleep. This causes chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
Thankfully, numerous treatments are available to help you breathe easier at night and enhance your general quality of life.
Conservative Interventions to Manage Sleep Apnea
These non-medical methods can usually resolve or improve this syndrome. They can lessen the disease to the point that it is not severe enough to produce symptoms. One of these methods is reducing weight. For those who are overweight or obese, a 10% reduction in body weight can significantly improve the situation.
Additionally, sleep aids and shifting positions while sleeping. This condition is more likely to occur when you sleep on your back. By keeping you off your back, special support pillows and similar devices can help you shift your sleeping position and prevent breathing obstructions caused by soft tissue pressing on your windpipe.
Moreover, nasal strips and devices are also used in a sleep apnea procedure to help open nasal passages and reduce airflow restrictions.
Oral gadgets
The soft tissue e in your head or neck, particularly around your mouth and jaw, presses down on your windpipe, causing obstruction and breathing results. Using special mouthpiece devices, your jaw and tongue can be held in a posture that relieves pressure on your windpipe. Dentists and sleep medicine professionals frequently collaborate to create these.
Stimulators of nerves
the hypoglossal nerve controls your tongue’s movements. This nerve can be stimulated with a nerve stimulator, which will cause your tongue to move a little forward when you breathe while asleep.
However, these stimulators can be switched on before bed and off when you wake up. Although it’s not overly strong, the electrical current is gentle enough to prevent your tongue from relaxing too much.
Surgeries
Blockages of the nose, throat, and windpipe can be avoided with surgery of the mouth, nose, and throat. However, these effects on adults are often mild and vary from person to person. Among these operations are:
- Somnoplasty- In this operation, the soft tissue surrounding the upper portions of your windpipe is reduced using radiofrequency
- Surgery on the jaw. -Your jaw can be slightly moved during specific surgical procedures to prevent soft tissue from pressing back on your airway easily.
- Nasal surgery- Septoplasty is a popular type of nasal surgery that straightens the soft tissue in your nose.
All these procedures help to make a smooth passage of air through the nasal pathway.
Medications
Last but not least, this condition can also be treated with medication, including phrenic nerve stimulators, adaptive ventilation, and positive airway pressure. Among these pharmaceuticals are respiratory-stimulating drugs, hypnotic (sleep-promoting) drugs, and others. However, none of these drugs are officially authorized or widely recognized for this purpose.
Conclusion
Depending on the kind and severity of the condition, there are numerous ways to treat sleep apnea. All of them can help prevent apnea attacks or lessen their frequency and severity, but none of them is a cure.
In a nutshell, you should incorporate many therapies into your day or evening for complete relief. As long as you utilize these therapies, that can eventually lessen or perhaps completely eradicate the impacts of sleep apnea on your life.