How Sleep Apnea Affects the Immune System

If you suffer from sleep apnea, you might be wondering how sleep apnea affects the immune system. Well, you might be surprised to learn that sleeping and your immune system go hand-in-hand.

Sleep apnea weakens the immune system. People who suffer from sleep apnea have their sleep disturbed on a nightly basis. What happens to people who suffer from sleep apnea is that they stop breathing for a brief moment or a few moments in the middle of the night. This might not seem like a big deal, but the consequences are vast.

Sometimes the person does not stop breathing, but the breathing is extremely slowed for that moment. In either case, the person is disturbed from his or her sleep. The individual might wake up suddenly, or the person might just move from a deeper level of sleep into a lighter one. This disrupts the normal progression of the sleep cycles.

In general, people need certain amounts of the different stages of sleep every night in order to be healthy and to function normally. When someone has sleep apnea, that person is not getting the correct amounts of sleep. A consequence of not getting enough sleep with sleep apnea is that your immune sytem is weakened. If you continue to not get enough sleep, your immune system is just going to degenerate even more.

If your immune sytem is weak, you are much more susceptible to any diseases that you come into contact with. Furthermore, once you get a disease, your body is not able to properly fight it off because it does not have the proper strength to do so.

Stopping Sleep Apnea

The best way to resolve this problem of how does sleep apnea affect the immune sytem is to get treated for sleep apnea. Make sure you consult a doctor before trying any of these methods of preventing or curing sleep apnea.

• continuous positive airflow pressure
• dental devices
• behavorial changes (such as dieting or exercises as sleep apnea is frequently related to obesity)
• surgery (surgery of this type can be extremely risky)

Although there are several methods of treatment, the most widely used is the continuous positive airflow pressure (CPAP) machine where a steady stream of pressurized air is blown into the airwaves to keep the airwaves unobstructed.

Sleep apnea affects the immune system. Talk with your doctor about the best way to diagnose and stop the symptoms of sleep apnea.