Suffering from severely broken sleep patterns can have a serious impact on your life. If you experience such inconvenience it is possible that you have sleep apnea, a condition in which the muscles at the rear of the mouth relax during sleep and prevent adequate amounts of oxygen from reaching the lungs. There is a link between the condition and heart failure.
When the muscles at the back of your mouth relax, not enough oxygen can get through and the brain sends an automatic signal that is not receiving enough of the oxygen it needs. This causes the body to wake up. You might only wake up for a few seconds and go immediately back to sleep and some patients don’t even notice that they are waking up for tiny amounts of time in the night, just that they are extremely fatigued during the day.
This fatigue in the day can have a serious impact on the life of a sufferer. Traffic accidents become more likely and it is dangerous to use heavy machinery. Perhaps the most worrying impact though is the link to heart failure. Sleep apnea and the fatigue it causes often bring on a state of hypertension in the patient. This leaves them at greater risk of suffering from heart failure and strokes.
By allowing your dentist to examine your mouth in detail you are giving yourself the best chance of having sleep apnea diagnosed and then it can be dealt with. Often patients are given a device to wear in their mouth during the night which ensures that oxygen flows into the lungs unrestricted.
If you are worried about sleep apnea, make an appointment to see your Leeds dentist.
Tags: heart failure, sleep apnea
