High-quality rest and adequate sleep aren’t only essential for you to feel and perform your best, but they also significantly impact your health. Poor, insufficient sleep is linked to everything from irritability and depression to systemic inflammation, which is associated with serious conditions like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers.
The dedicated team of providers at Houston Neurological Institute has expertise in treating sleep disorders, including one that affects about 39 million Americans: obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). The condition interrupts your breathing for brief periods, repeatedly, while sleeping.
Sleep apnea wreaks havoc on your physical and mental well-being, and we offer an innovative treatment that many patients are finding to be both successful and more comfortable than the standard treatment.
For your doctor to diagnose you with sleep apnea, you need to experience periods when you don’t breathe for over 10 seconds at a time while you’re sleeping, at least five times per hour over the course of the night. Those with severe sleep apnea can experience more than 30 breathing interruptions per hour.
OSA stems from the fact that when you sleep, all of your muscles become relaxed, including the muscles in your mouth and throat. When they relax into your airway, they cause you to stop breathing for that brief but pivotal time. Your brain wakes you up briefly to clear the obstruction, you fall back asleep, and then it happens all over again, depriving you of restful, deep sleep.
The severity of sleep apnea is measured numerically on the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), according to how many times per night your sleep is disturbed by a lack of oxygen. If you have mild sleep apnea, your AHI will be between 5-15, and if it’s moderate, your AHI will be between 15-30. If you live with severe sleep apnea, your AHI will be over 30.
What are the effects of these broken sleep patterns? You may experience:
You’re at higher risk for sleep apnea if you’re chronically congested, postmenopausal, overweight, or have a thicker neck. If you have a family history of sleep apnea or some type of defect on the tissues that support your neck and head, you’re also more likely to be diagnosed with OSA.
Before your Houston Neurological Institute provider can create a personalized treatment plan for you, they must diagnose you with OSA. This can be hard to do when all your doctor has to go on is anecdotal information from you about your symptoms and when up to 90% of those with OSA are completely unaware they have it. Left unchecked, they’re at risk for serious health complications.
This is why we advise patients to come to our full-service sleep study center, where we can perform:
We also offer sleep monitors for patients to use at home that help us arrive at a definitive OSA diagnosis.
If you’re diagnosed with OSA, we may recommend that you use a CPAP machine while you sleep. The device uses gentle air pressure to keep your airway open so you can breathe well while you sleep. It has a mask that covers either your nose or your nose and mouth and that you strap around your head. It also has a tube that connects to the machine’s motor, which delivers the air to you.
Many people find CPAP machines to be cumbersome and uncomfortable to sleep with, which makes them more likely to skip using it. This in turn puts their health at risk.
Houston Neurological Institute is now proud to offer an alternative OSA solution that’s transforming the way people sleep. It’s called InspireⓇ, and it’s innovative because treatment is internal rather than external like a CPAP machine.
Inspire is revolutionary because it’s a small implantable device that sends gentle pulses toward your airway muscles. Each pulse ensures that your tongue doesn’t block your airway, so you don’t experience breathing interruptions.
There are many benefits to Inspire treatment:
We can refer you to an ENT specialist for the implantation procedure, and we support you fully before and after it.
If you’re ready to sleep better, enjoy sharper days, and breathe comfortably at night, make an appointment to learn more about Inspire. Schedule by calling our Pasadena or Pearland office, or book your appointment online.
