Focus on sleep - treatment for apnea
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008Researchers are not sure why apnea occurs. Attempts to correct the disorder through surgical widening of the nasal passages have largely failed, indicating the problem is less of an anatomical than neurological nature.
Alan Solko, 64, of Queens, used to snore so loudly that his wife couldn’t bear sleeping with him and visitors could hear him “all the way down the hall,” he said recently. “I felt nothing. I just snored. I slept very well. But I kept my wife up all night,” he said.
One of the most common, most dangerous and most easily treated sleep disorders is apnea. Million of Americans stop breathing for up to two minutes at a time in their sleep and suffer related respiratory and heart problems, according to the American Sleep Disorders Association.
After seven years of ever-louder nocturnal snoring, Solko sought help at the Stony Brook University Hospital sleep laboratory. “I didn’t know until I slept in the test at the hospital that I was stopping breathing three hundred times or more a night. That scared the hell out of me. It meant I could die in my sleep,” Solko said.
