How sleep apnea boosts your blood pressure & harms your heart....

Today's post: Friday, 10-24-2008

It seems that even mild sleep apnea causes high blood pressure and can lead to heart disease and stokes and more.

Today on Yahoo’s online news in the Health Day section I found an article called, “Even Mild Sleep Apnea Hikes Heart Risk.”

The researchers in the British study reported there found that even mild sleep apnea created endothelial dysfunction, harm to the inside surface of your blood vessels, and, as a result it created increasing arterial stiffness which in turn significantly increases the blood pressure of the people it happens to. That increases the risk of the people who this happens to for heart attacks and strokes and can also help cause peripheral artery disease, PAD, kidney failure, and erectile dysfunction.

Previously we knew that people who have sleep apnea bad enough to make them too sleepy during the day had this risk. But this study found that this happened to people who had mild sleep apnea and may not even have known it. That is the news this study reported.

The study was done at the Oxford Centre for Respiratory Medicine; and the press release was from the American Thoracic Society news.

The study is also in the November issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

What the story did NOT report is how the researchers found out these people had mild sleep apnea when some of the people studied may not have initially known they had mild sleep apnea.

Here are three clues to look for:

1. Are you fatter than you should be and fatter in your face and neck than looks good or as you did when you were much younger? (Pictures of famous people who live in Tennessee, Kentucky, and other parts of the American South often show this look. Something in the regional diet from that part of the United States seems to cause this effect.)

This makes sleep apnea much more likely.

2. You often snore loudly enough to wake or bother your significant other.

When people snore loudly the same airway restriction often causes sleep apnea.

3. You have high blood pressure. Sleep apnea is far from being the only cause of high blood pressure. But if you have sleep apnea, as this study found, you also will develop high blood pressure.

If you have #1 or #2 or more two or more of these 3 clues, you may well have sleep apnea.

What to do if you have sleep apnea?

Something called CPAP, Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, works but requires you to sleep connected up to a machine that forces air into you.

There’s an alternative that I would check out more thoroughly if I were to get sleep apnea that may well do the job and which does NOT require you to be connected up to anything while you sleep.

The company who produces it says that the doctors who have used it have gotten excellent results; and it can be done one day and you can be back at work the next as it is not very invasive.

“Stop Snoring and Obstructive Sleep Apnea with The Pillar Procedure.”

www.pillarprocedure.com

We are also about to publish an eBook on how to lower high blood pressure without drugs that has some ways to improve or reverse the endothelial dysfunction that causes the high blood pressure. These ways help your blood vessels relax and become more flexible which has been shown to lower high blood pressure. These ways also have other health benefits.

We’ll announce this eBook here when it is available.