FATIGUE WITHOUT EXPLANATION
DYSFUNCTIONAL SLEEP
It’s not all about obstructive sleep apnea.
Finding the reasons behind your restless, interrupted sleep is sometimes not as hard as you think it might be. We can assess and treat what is keeping you or your child from the rest you need to be your best every day.
Many patients arrive at our practice with nowhere else to turn. They had a sleep study that was negative - no sleep apnea present. The physician said you don’t have sleep apnea, there is nothing I can do for you. We have to wait until you have sleep apnea (or until you are more diseased) and then we can treat you with a breathing machine. What is often not discussed is that there is an entire spectrum of breathing disordered sleep that happens before one gets to end-stage disease/sleep apnea. With age and/or weight gain, your airway and sleep will get worse. If you are a female, this will often speed up once you reach menopause.
You do not have to wait to meet the criteria for significant disease to breathe and sleep better. Would you wait until your stage 1 cancer becomes stage 2 or 3 and then treat it?
You may be also thinking, why do I have to wait until I get sleep apnea until I can be helped? You don’t. In the conventional medical model, you do have to wait. With the functional approach, we can help! We understand that breathing disordered sleep is not black and white; it is not simply you are healthy or have sleep apnea. There are many shades of gray and subtleties between optimal breathing/sleep and sleep apnea. We are here to address all of black and white as well as the gray areas.
We help treat the underlying cause before the disease progresses and you are “sick enough” to get a diagnosis and treatment. The smoke signals are everywhere and we can treat them. You do not have to wait for the fire!
SLEEP DISORDERS
There are over 70 different sleep disorders that have been defined and are grouped into 3 general categories: lack of sleep, excessive sleep, or disturbed sleep. Proper diagnosis is key. At AirSync, we treat and manage disturbed sleep, specifically breathing-disordered sleep. What is not widely understood is that how well we breathe and the mode of breathing determines how well we sleep and how restorative and qualitative that sleep will be. If we breathe nasally, with our tongue suctioned against the roof of the mouth, with lips sealed, sleep will generally be well-organized and qualitative. When breathing is other than “invisible” quiet nasal breathing, a person is not breathing as nature intended. There is an entire range of breathing and breathing disordered sleep.
UPPER AIRWAY RESISTANCE SYNDROME (UARS)
The little sibling of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), this condition was identified at Stanford University by the same beloved Dr. Christian Guillemenault who defined OSA. It has similar characteristics to OSA, in that the airway is reduced, sleep is disturbed and fragmented which results in subsequent excessive daytime sleepiness.
UARS patients tend to share the following symptoms/co-diagnoses:
daytime fatigue
light-sleeper
doesn’t like to sleep on their back
Insomnia
Headaches/Migraines
TMJ Problems
Depression, Anxiety
Cold hands
Low blood pressure
UARS patients may have even more significant daytime symptoms than OSA patients. Patients with UARS often go undetected as they do not meet the criteria of OSA because they do not have blood oxygen changes, but do have constantly interrupted sleep. You may be one of these persons looking for an answer to your chronic daytime fatigue, poor sleep quality, and yet your sleep study came back negative and the sleep physician had no treatment to offer you.
And, you may not know that as you age, gain weight, and/or a female (experiencing hormone changes with menopause), your condition will worsen. But, you do not have to wait to get a diagnosis of OSA to feel better and sleep well. You do not need a diagnosis of OSA to prove that you are not breathing, sleeping, or resting well. Regardless, you are not breathing or sleeping well and AirSync can help.