Sleep apnea is connected to a number of health risks, and heart disease is one of those on top of the list.
Can you have a heart attack from sleep apnea? Sleep apnea patients have poor cardiovascular health, which raises their chances of getting a heart attack. Aside from that, sleep apnea also raises the chances of a stroke and high blood pressure.
Read more to find out how sleep apnea affects the heart. You’ll also learn more about other health risks associated with sleep apnea.
How Sleep Apnea Affects the Heart
To better understand how sleep apnea affects the heart, it is first important to learn what happens to your body when you have sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea is characterized by disturbances in breathing. Some sleep apnea patients may stop breathing for around 10 seconds, while there are those who experience breathing interruptions for at least a minute. For those with severe cases of sleep apnea, they can experience these interruptions over a hundred times in a single night.
You may think that this could lead to death, knowing that people can actually stop breathing while they sleep. But our bodies are equipped with a built-in radar that tells us when our blood oxygen levels are running low.
The brain then triggers a burst of cortisol into the body, which prompts the heart to work overtime.
Now, here’s the problem. Knowing that this entire process happens a few times each night, you can just imagine the level of stress that the elevated heart rates and blood pressure can bring to your heart. This is what increases the chances of a heart attack due to sleep apnea.
How Severe is Your Sleep Apnea?
If you have been diagnosed with sleep apnea or are worried that you may have the condition, know that the severity varies from case to case. Although it can be bad enough to trigger a heart attack, there are also a lot of cases where the condition is still mild.
For mild cases, the interruptions in breathing while sleeping could happen around 5 times a night. Of course, as the case becomes more severe, the number of instances also increases.
When you go to a sleep center to be diagnosed, they will gauge the severity of your sleep apnea based on the number of incidents per hour.
Those who have 5 to 15 instances of sleep interruptions per hour are seen to have mild sleep apnea. Moderate sleep apnea would mean having 15 to 30 sleep interruptions in an hour. And for those who have severe sleep apnea, they are most likely going to have over 30 interruptions in breathing in a single hour alone.
The severity of sleep apnea may also be based on the level of oxygen deprivation you experience in each of these episodes. Especially when heart or lung disease enters the picture, the overall effect on the body may be even more drastic, considering both short-term and long-term.
Other Health Risks Related to Sleep Apnea
The heart is not the only thing that is affected when you have sleep apnea. Knowing that this condition can actually make you stop breathing, you can just imagine how diverse its effects can be for the entire body.
Here are a few other health risks related to sleep apnea:
- Stroke
Sleep apnea can be one of the effects of stroke. However, it can also work in reverse and can cause a stroke as well.
Central sleep apnea is a form of apnea that is characterized by the brain not being able to communicate effectively with the parts of the body responsible for breathing. Knowing that a stroke can cause damage to your brain, it’s understandable how it can cause central sleep apnea.
But there are also those who have sleep apnea but have not had a stroke yet. In this case, the frequent increase in blood pressure because of low oxygen levels heightens the possibility of a stroke in the future.
You see, when your body goes through an episode of sleep apnea, it exerts a lot of effort into trying to open up your airways so that you can breathe in and out more efficiently. The nervous system then triggers the release of hormones just to try to jolt your body into waking up and taking a breath of air to try and pull your blood oxygen levels back to normal. This amount of stress can get very tiring for your nervous system, which can contribute to the possibility of a stroke.
- Diabetes
Diabetes is yet another serious condition that is seen to be connected to sleep apnea. In fact, studies show that 2 out of 3 men over 65 years old who have diabetes have also been diagnosed with sleep apnea.
Based on the studies, it seems that the breathing interruptions during sleep can be linked to the body’s glucose intolerance and insulin resistance.
Glucose intolerance refers to any kind of condition where your blood glucose levels increase. As for insulin resistance, it is when your body does not respond well to the insulin that your body produces.
Insulin resistance is one of the main driving factors that result to type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes.
- Pregnancy complications
Obesity has always been linked to sleep apnea because of the way excess fat around the neck and throat block the airways. It’s the same concept that puts the health of pregnant women and the babies they carry at risk.
Experts observed that women in their 3rd trimester who went over the body mass index of 35 showed extremely low blood oxygen levels while they sleep. This is why it is important that pregnant women keep track of their sleeping patterns, as having sleep apnea during their pregnancy can open up a number of other health risks.
For one, women who have sleep apnea while they’re pregnant are more likely to have gestational diabetes. They are also 4 times more exposed to the risks of high blood pressure.
- Mental health concerns
The amount and quality of sleep that a person gets affects one’s moods. Knowing that sleep apnea hinders proper sleeping patterns, it is not surprising that sleep apnea has been linked to a number of mental health conditions.
Most people know that insomnia has always been tied to depression. But insomnia brought about by sleep apnea is seen to have an even bigger impact, contributing to depression and anxiety.
- Kidney disease
It is always ideal for the body to maintain balance in terms of its physical and chemical conditions. This balance is disrupted by sleep apnea, and kidney disease is one of the potential aftereffects of this imbalance.
The kidney is responsible for filtering out any wastes in our system. However, the way it functions varies greatly during the day and at night. This is because our bodies are usually on recharge mode when we sleep.
When we lose sleep or have erratic sleeping patterns (as with the case of sleep apnea patients), the kidney is unable to do its job well. This is why the kidneys of people who sleep less (or have restless sleep) show faster deterioration than anybody else.
Related Questions
Can you die in your sleep from sleep apnea?
Although people who have sleep apnea stop breathing while sleeping, our bodies are programmed to wake up when this happens. Our brain triggers a burst of hormones into our system when it noticed low blood oxygen levels, prompting our heart to work double time. This means that you cannot die from suffocation due to sleep apnea. However, you may die from the complications brought about by sleep apnea. Those with sleep apnea have a higher risk of having a heart attack, whether asleep or awake, for example.
Does sleep apnea cause rapid heart rate?
Sleep apnea could cause your heart rate to soar when your body tries to jolt you awake every time your blood oxygen levels drop. But while you’re going through sleep apnea and are experiencing irregular breathing, it also slows down drastically. This is the reason why the heart of a sleep apnea patient is always under great stress.
