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Re: Long-term health Qs

Posted by Djabiuk on January 10, 2005 at 00:32:28:

In Reply to: Re: Long-term health Qs posted by D.H. on January 07, 2005 at 18:54:26:

My wife noticed that I stopped breathing periodically while sleeping. That is not a symptom, so much as a definition of the problem. The symptoms I lack are that I do not feel sleepy, let alone fall asleep, during the day, frequently work 80 hour weeks in an intellectually demanding job, without any loss of alertness or excessive fatigue, no headaches. Perhaps I will develop such symptoms over time, but it seems possible that there are other explanations as well.

Perhaps, for example (and I'm going on intuition more than expertise here), the number of arousals (which may keep a person from getting to that valuable REM sleep) is more determinant of those short-term symptoms than the RDI # is. That is, although I have a very high number of obstructions per hour, it doesn't seem that they wake me up--I begin breathing without waking up, even for a split second. Consequently, I dream (quite vividly and repeatedly) every night. Dream sleep seems to be restorative sleep, so maybe the fact that I have so many obstructions, which makes my O2 level drop, means that my long-term health concerns are the same as any other similarly severe apneic, while the immediate symptoms are much less severe than most/many apneics with the same RDI. So in the short term, I am better off than many, but in the long term I may be worse off (because less motivated to comply with CPAP, since I experience no immediate relief/improvement in how I feel (since I feel fine to begin with). I dunno, but that is why I was looking for more scary info about the long-term effects, so as to bolster my desire to pursue a treatment that I find both uncomfortable and non-efficacious.

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