Sleep Apnea part 1

As I may have mentioned earlier I have suffered from daytime fatigue pretty much all my life. The fatigue is somewhat random and I have exhausted pretty much all common medical reasons for it and have not been able to recognize any reasonable pattern with my diet, workouts and other habits. Sometimes even when on holiday without any heavy workouts, caloric deficits or alcohol intake I would wake up tired and cranky after 9 hours of sleep.

During normal work weeks I would some days wake up completely exhausted after 7 to 8 hours of sleep. Before I just used to think this was caused by chronic insomnia, alcohol consumption, smoking and bad diet and did not give much thought about it until I fixed all those issues and got otherwise healthy.

So recently I decided to cough up the cash (about 400 euros after the national health care fees) for a sleep study. Where many might see all the instrumentation and sensors you have to put on burdening – as an engineer with a keen interest in health and anatomy this was actually a really interesting experience for me. I think I gave the doc and nurses more questions about how their fancy equipment work then they cared for.

The study itself was pretty straight forward. First I had to have a daytime consultation with a doctor specialized in somnology (the scientific studying of sleep) where he asked me questions about my health and habits, medications and explained how the study is done and what it can tell us and what are the typical sleep disorders that could disrupt my sleep and cause daytime fatigue. He concluded that I had no existing health conditions that could predispose me to sleep disorders. Though he did mention that daytime fatigue is a symptom of depression which I was currently medicated for. I was well aware of this and since I felt the fatigue was more of a cause then a symptom – we both concluded it would be wise to go on with the sleep study.

So a couple days later I went to the sleep clinic after work. There a nurse put 18 sensors around my body which took about hour and half. I will write more about the tech, science and results in another post. After that I drove home and spent the night pretty normally chilling out – wasn’t allowed to sweat or shower so no sauna or weights that night. I was allowed to sleep at home which was great. In the morning I drove back to the clinic (fortunately it’s very close to my home and work place) where another nurse took off all the sensors (and some of my body hair with them… may you rest in peace) off and I took a quick shower and headed back to work.

I had scheduled a check up with the doc a week later. I will go more in depth with the results in another post and keep this short. The doc explained the results to me. I actually had pretty decent amount of sleep considering that I was feeling like my sleep was lacking. The bad news was that my sleep was somewhat fragmented – I would bounce back to near conscious stage 1 sleep every few minutes. The doc told me this is likely genetic.

More surprising problem was that I had enough apneas (pauses in breathing) to be diagnosed with mild sleep apnea even though I’m not obese nor do I snore audibly. I actually snored about 44% of the test night, it just wasn’t very loud. This was a clear indication that I my apnea was the obstructive (due to collapsing of the airways, common) kind and not the central (a disorder where the breathing center in your brains shuts off periodically during sleep, rare) kind.

I was actually relieved to learn there might be a clear medical reason for my daytime fatigue which definitely has affected my life on many levels. In the next part I will go to more detail of my sleep study and tell you how this is related to stress and why you should get a sleep study done asap if you have any doubt you might be suffering from sleep apnea.