Chronic Insomnia? Beware of Sleep Apnea.

Insomnia is defined as having difficulty falling/staying asleep or waking up tired. Suffering from insomnia for over a year without proper treatment may result in mental health disorders such as bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, etc. Insomnia is a symptom not an illness. Just like fevers or abdominal pains, insomnia is a sign of a disease. You have to find the underlying cause and begin treatment instead of merely treating the symptom and just taking hypnotics. 

There are many cases in which the chief complaint is insomnia but the cause is not found. The patient reports difficulty falling sleeping, dreaming all night or not being able to falling asleep at all. After an all-night polysomnography, it is found that the patient has sleep apnea.

The reason why sleep apnea causes patients to wake up tired is because when patients fall asleep, their respiratory tract narrows, causing their respiratory tract to be blocked. Airflow is decreased and therefore the blood oxygen content is lowered. When the medulla oblongata senses that the blood oxygen content has decreased and the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood has increased, the body will automatically wake up to breathe. After falling asleep, the patient may wake up again because the respiratory tract is blocked yet again. The vicious cycle may cause patients with sleep apnea to wake up over hundreds of times throughout the night.

As patients are consistently in light sleep, they may feel like they haven’t slept all night and suffer from daytime fatigue. In the long-term, this will affect their physical health and also may indirectly cause car crashes, occupational accidents, etc.