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PROFESSOR GUY LESCHZINER looks at managing sleep apnoea - Daily Mail
Jan 18, 2022 2 mins, 15 secs

But the same can’t be said of sleep apnoea.

One possible — if under-considered — explanation is sleep apnoea.

One of the main risk factors for sleep apnoea is being overweight (especially if you carry fat around the neck).

Other signs include snoring and multiple night-time trips to the loo, as hormone changes caused by each pause in breathing encourage the kidneys to produce more urine than they normally would at night.

One immediate effect of sleep apnoea is significant sleepiness during the day, sometimes so severe that it leaves people at risk of falling asleep whenever relaxing, or even behind the wheel of a car: sleep apnoea increases the risk of a car accident by two to three times.

This tiredness doesn’t make sense as you think you slept all night, but you were actually having your sleep disrupted several times an hour.

And while we know that sleep apnoea is strongly associated with obesity, the condition itself may encourage you to put on weight.

For instance, we know that sleep apnoea also influences the levels of two hormones, leptin and ghrelin, that are important for the regulation of appetite and the metabolism.

There are plenty of outliers — a few people can thrive on five hours a night, while others still struggle with closer to nine hours of unbroken sleep.

A baby will sleep for two-thirds of the day but, by adulthood, we tend to sleep between six-and-a-half and eight-and-a-half hours a night (again, these are averages only).

And sleep itself has multiple stages, which we repeat through in roughly 90-minute cycles, four or five times throughout the night.

As we drift off, we enter stage 1 ‘drowsy’ sleep, then stage 2, known as light sleep, when brain activity slows further but we might still easily be nudged awake.

Stage 3 is deep sleep and we usually enter it after 30 minutes or so.

The final stage, which we tend to enter after around 60 to 75 minutes, is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

As adults, we enjoy more deep sleep in the first half of the night and the majority of REM sleep in the second?

The proportion of deep sleep changes too, being roughly 15 to 25 per cent in adulthood, but dropping a little in the elderly, usually replaced by Stage 1 and 2 sleep?

If you answered ‘yes’ to 0-2 questions, you are likely to be at low risk of sleep apnoea

If you answered ‘yes’ to 3-4 questions, you are likely at a medium risk of sleep apnoea

If you answered ‘yes’ to 5-8 questions overall — or if you answered ‘yes’ to two or more of the questions numbered 1-4, and ‘yes’ to any of questions 5-8, you are likely at high risk of sleep apnoea

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