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Cornary Heart Disease Resource

A Guide to Sleep Apnea and Heart Disease


The issue of sleep apnea and heart disease is one which is very important to take into consideration, especially considering the significant rise in both ailments which has taken place over the past few years. The connection between sleep apnea and heart disease is one which has truly only been recognized over the past decade or so, but is now actually considered as being one of the most monumental findings in health science of the century.

What is Sleep Apnea?

Sleep apnea occurs when a person actually stops breathing at points during their sleep, and it is a common disorder which can be incredibly serious.

The most common type of sleep apnea is obstructive sleep apnea, and during sleep what happens is that not enough air flow can get to your lungs through your mouth and nose even though you try to breathe, and when that happens the amount of oxygen in your blood may drop, and normal breaths then start again, typically with a loud snort or choking sound.

The Connection Between Sleep Apnea and Heart Disease

The connection between sleep apnea and heart disease is that sleep apnea is now considered as being one of the most major underlying causes of heart disease. It is believed that there is a strong association between obstructive sleep apnea and hypertension, heart failure, stroke and ischemic heart disease. As well, recent research has shown that obstructive sleep apnea patients who have normal blood pressure run a risk of developing high blood pressure within four years.

Sleep apnea patients have been found to have much higher levels of sympathetic nervous system activity during both wake and sleep than a matched set of control patients without obstructive sleep apnea. These sleep apnea patients are also known to have much faster heart rates than non-apnea patients, but at the same time they tend to have less variability in their heart rates overall.

Basically how this works is that as sleep apnea patients stop breathing during their sleep, their oxygen levels end up decreasing and their carbon dioxide levels correspondingly increase. This results in activating the sympathetic nervous system, and so when the apnea patient breathes in, their cardiac output increases while their blood pressure spikes greatly. This is seriously problematic because it results in disrupting the normal nighttime regulation of blood pressure and the sympathetic nervous system.

The issue of sleep apnea and heart disease is being extensively worked on, in order to come to better and more detailed results, and this is really the only way that any positive solutions will be able to come out of this. There are so many causes of heart disease as it is, and so reducing this number is the best way to attack the problem of heart disease in general.

There are many different forms of heart disease, with the most common cause being a narrowing or blockage of the coronary arteries, which are the blood vessels that work to supply blood to the heart itself. When it comes to the effects on the human heart, constant inhalation of smoke over an extended period of years, probably the most significant effect that smoke has is the fact that it constricts the arteries. Although there is no way to positively prevent yourself from developing heart disease, you can do things to protect yourself against it as much as possible, and by maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle you will not only be guarding yourself against heart disease but as well against various other heart and health conditions. The causes of coronary heart disease are such that they may even begin when the patient is in his or her early adolescent years though diagnosis usually takes place during later in his or her life, most often following a stroke or heart attack. The first stage of chronic heart disease tends to come with lesions and cracks that form in the blood vessel walls, with the second stage being where the body attempts to repair itself, by depositing fatty substances such as cholesterol and lipoproteins inside the blood vessels in order to fill up these lesions and cracks.