Maybe undiagnosed sleep apnea

A friend of a neighbor of mine died suddenly during the night last week. She was 71. I never met her personally but spoke to her on the phone because she had the same surgeon for a knee replacement as I will be having for revision hip surgery, when it becomes really necessary. She sounded very nice and she was very helpful with info about this surgeon.

As I said, I never met her. My neighbor had called to tell me she died and I looked at the obit in the local paper. There was a picture, as has become the custom it seems. She was definitely quite overweight and her neck was huge! When I saw the picture I thought - maybe undiagnosed sleep apnea. She lived alone so no one would know if she snored or stopped breathing in the night and I don't know if she felt tired during the day. I don't know if she raised excessive daytime sleepiness to her doctor or not. He may not have made the connection if she did.

I wish I had met her and I may have been of some help if I had seen her neck. I could well be wrong but I wish I had met her. It's a shame if she did have undiagnosed sleep apnea.

Just wanted to post for purposes of awareness of sleep apnea.

I think it is probably very much something not on the public's radar about how much sleep issues can contribute to an early demise.

One of the problems is that there is no evidence. When Heath Ledger or Brittany Murphy or Phillip Seymour Hoffman or thousands of folks we don't know die in their sleep, the autopsy does not find sleep apnea. It is always blamed on the drugs, or something else; whatever the ME can target on easiest, assuming there even is an autopsy.

Drugs are a contributing factor in many cases (PSH is the only one abusing drugs of the three mentioned), but since 90% of sleep issues go undiagnosed, no one really knows how sinister it might actually be, so SA is also a potential contributing factor, except one that is never mentioned because the ME can't find that, and the public at large does not understand this quite yet.

It is also impossible to prove a negative; just because there is no way to find SA as a cause of death or contributing factor in an autopsy does not mean that it was not contributory. "He died of natural causes". Well, undiagnosed SA is the textbook definition, then, of a natural cause, except that it is a natural cause that can be eliminated. And that is what is key here; that is the point everyone should have a fighting chance to understand.

Sadly, few do. The awareness of SA as an early cause of health issues and death is about as high on the awareness scale as how dangerous putting tobacco between your lips and setting fire to it just to inhale the smoke was in the 50's. we've come a very long way from there, but we have a very long way to go.

Bottom line, the real potential, for those diagnosed, to extend one's life for decades simply by wearing a mask during sleep is a trade-off certainly worth making. It is certainly worth getting a diagnosis if there are any warning signs. No-brainer.