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How Untreated Sleep Apnea Increases Your Risk of Heart Disease
February is American Heart Month, where practices and organizations ramp up educating the public about the health hazards of heart disease. You may wonder why we’re mentioning it here. It’s because your oral health can prove a risk factor for a number of heart-related problems.
At Manteca Dental Care in Manteca, California, Dr. Rick Van Tran and our team are your first stop for diagnosing and treating sleep apnea. We encourage our patients not to ignore this issue, as it has many negative effects, not the least of which is increasing your risk of heart disease. Here, we describe the connection between the two conditions.
What is sleep apnea?
There are three types of sleep apnea: obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), central sleep apnea, and a combination of the two.
OSA accounts for about 90% of cases and is notable for its partial or complete obstruction of your upper airway. The obstruction occurs when the tissues at the back of your throat relax too much, permitting the soft tissues of your palate, uvula, and throat walls to collapse into your airway, resulting in a temporary pause in breathing.
The pause lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a minute, and it can occur up to hundreds of times a night. When your brain is deprived of oxygen, it sends a signal to wake you up and start breathing again.
You startle into partial wakefulness, clear your airway, and fall back asleep, only to repeat the cycle again and again, though you probably won’t remember any of it. This leads to fragmented and non-restorative sleep. As a result, people with OSA often feel unrefreshed when they get up and are excessively sleepy during the day.
OSA symptoms
The classic symptoms of OSA are loud, habitual snoring, gasping or choking sounds as you wake up, and excessive daytime sleepiness.
Other common symptoms include:
- Insomnia or disrupted sleep
- Difficulty concentrating and problems with memory
- Morning headaches
- Irritability and mood swings
Usually, you find out about OSA when your bed partner complains about your loud snoring and holding your breath. It’s important to see a sleep specialist or a dentist for treatment.
How sleep apnea increases your risk of heart disease
Because the pauses in breath of OSA deprive your lungs of oxygen, they cause significant stress on your body. Sleep apnea is associated with a bevy of serious health complications, including coronary heart disease, heart failure, stroke, and an irregular heartbeat.
Researchers estimate that patients with untreated sleep apnea are 2-4 times more likely to develop heart arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms) than people who don’t have it. Sleep apnea also increases your risk of heart failure by 140% and coronary heart disease by 30%.
Regularly missing sleep can negatively impact heart health. One of sleep’s many important functions is to allow your body to rest and recuperate. Heart rate and blood pressure normally drop during sleep as breathing becomes stable and regular.
Not getting enough sleep because of OSA means not giving your heart and the rest of your cardiovascular system important recovery time. Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to an increased risk of hypertension, heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
Because of increased fat and tissue in the neck that can block the upper airway, obesity is a common cause of sleep apnea. Researchers have determined that even a 10% increase in body weight increases the risk of OSA by six-fold.
There’s one more factor to consider.
Your sympathetic nervous system responds to a low level of oxygen by constricting your blood vessels and increasing your heart rate and blood pressure to pump blood to meet your body’s needs.
With the paused breath and startled wakefulness throughout the night, repetitive changes in your blood pressure can lead to hypertension or make existing hypertension worse.
If you’re chronically sleep-deprived and your bedmate complains about you snoring, it’s time to get tested for sleep apnea. At Manteca Dental Care, we have treatments that can help. Give us a call at 209-823-9218, or book an appointment online today.