Dangerous sleep apnea syndrome

Many sleep disorders have been brought to the attention of medical practitioners for a long time, but they are not given enough attention because people often take them for granted. With the development of modern medicine and the improvement of people’s living standards, people have begun to gradually recognize the harm caused by this type of disease, and sleep apnea hypoventilation syndrome is one of the most common and most dangerous diseases.  Recent studies have shown that early morning is the peak time of the day when death occurs, and the risk of death due to cardiovascular disease increases three times compared to other times of the day. In life, we occasionally encounter such situations: a friend who is always healthy suddenly dies inexplicably during sleep; clinicians often lament why patients who have been hospitalized for a period of time always have sudden changes in their condition at night, or even die unexpectedly; a lively baby passes away quietly in his sleep, and the sad mother often blames herself, believing that she was careless and that her nipple or arm blocked the baby’s airway, making him suffocate. The mother often blames herself, thinking that she was careless and that her nipple or arm blocked the baby’s airway, making it suffocate and so on. Unbeknownst to us, these accidental deaths may be related to another common phenomenon in our sleep, which is snoring and frequent nocturnal sleep apnea.  The Sleep Research Center at Stanford University has done a lot of research on sleep breathing disorders and found that breathing cessation for more than 10 seconds during sleep can cause a significant reduction of oxygen in the patient’s blood, causing hypoxia in the body, and thus the breathing cessation for more than 10 seconds is called apnea. Occasionally, apnea occurs in normal people during sleep, but it usually does not cause much harm to the body. Only when this apnea occurs frequently and its frequency exceeds 5 times per hour, it can cause a series of clinical manifestations due to the repeated occurrence of hypoxia and the patient repeatedly waking up from sleep, which is medically called sleep apnea syndrome. Numerous surveys have found that 1-4% of the U.S. population suffers from the disease, and 1/4 of men and 1/10 of women aged 30-60 years have clinical manifestations of the disease. It is estimated that approximately 3,000 people die from the disease every day worldwide. Almost all patients have a history of snoring during sleep. In our country, although there are no accurate statistics yet, it is speculated from the number of snorers that the number of patients suffering from the disease will be such a huge number in a large country with 1.2 billion people!  In China, research on the disease was only carried out in the 1980s, so it is not surprising that the majority of patients and even a significant portion of medical workers do not know enough about it. Most patients with sleep apnea syndrome have the following common features: 1. loud and uneven snoring 2. breathing stoppage during sleep 3. abnormal movements during sleep 4. daytime sleepiness, unstoppable sleep while watching TV, meeting, riding in a car, listening to lectures 5. easy fatigue, weakness, the mind is often drowsy and does not relieve fatigue after sleep 6. obesity, hypertension 7. dry mouth in the morning, headache 8, memory loss, learning, work enthusiasm and ability to decline 9, male sexual dysfunction 10, nocturnal enuresis, irritability, irritability, aggressiveness 11, pharyngitis for a long time 12, unexplained frequent episodes of cardiac arrhythmia at night