Could Untreated Mild/Moderate Sleep Apnea Leave One Totally Dehabilitated?

[Kabuto]

Hi all,

I was diagnosed with Mild/Moderate Sleep Apnea For Quite Some Time Now.

I try to use my CPAP as best I can, and I've had mixed results with compliance (I'm working on it)

But I have to ask: would not using CPAP with Mild/Moderate Apnea really 'cripple' this much? To the point of not being able to have energy to hold down a job despite trying my absolute best?

I have an uncle, and two cousins that say they have sleep apnea, many of whom joke about not complying and using their CPAP as a doorstop- and none of them seem to have this problem. What could be happening?

[D.H.]

"Severity" measures events and oxygen desaturations, not how you feel. Different individuals are affected differently, so this is entirely possible.

[Goofproof]

Over time they will die, and no longer have to worry about not getting treated. Most problems solve themselves in the end, except we may not like the solution. Jim

Free Will, wins in the end.

[jnk...]

It has been said that humans need four basic things in sufficient quality and quantity to stay alive: air, sleep, water, and food. Untreated obstructive sleep apnea can quickly rob you of two out of the four. Suffocation, sleep deprivation, dehydration, and starvation all can kill--quickly or slowly--if not corrected. If your sleep is being hurt by your breathing during sleep, the jokes of others with similar diagnoses are not directly relevant to what you may need to do to save your life or improve the quality of it. It may be that their sleep is not as disturbed by their conditions are your sleep is by yours. Or it may be that other conditions you have are interacting with the problems of your sleep apnea. Whatever the case, if the significant problem is sleep-breathing, you need to make sure your treatment is effective, not just that you are compliant, and then use the treatment all night every night for many weeks before you can begin to judge anything about how much benefit you may be able to get from CPAP. This is, I believe, as true for those with mild-to-moderate OSA as it is true for those with moderate-to-severe OSA, since any severity of OSA has the potential to turn sleep into a train wreck. And as Jim mentioned, sleepy people tend to die. Usually from accidents. But sometimes from other things, too.

[SewTired]

I'm not sure if mild/moderate sleep apnea would leave you completely debilitated unless you had some other underlying issue going on, but certainly, if your oxygen level is chronically below 88%, it could. Also, if the apnea episodes are very long (I'm not sure if length of episode is calculated in the AHI). In my case, I have mild sleep apnea but another condition, resulting in very low oxygen without the cpap. So yeah, it was debilitating. I could no longer drive.

[jnk...]

If someone with an AHI below, say, 20, or maybe 15, has NO SYMPTOMS, I consider PAP to be optional for them. If they are sleepy, though, sleepiness can kill. For the mild-to-moderate, the nature of the SYMPTOMS becomes a crucial part of judging how necessary the treatment is, since, when it comes to OSA, the symptoms themselves can be as deadly as the problem itself--according to one way of looking at it, anyway. Above 20 AHI, a person should probably use CPAP whether symptomatic or not, according to how many docs look at it, since other significant damage from OSA can happen without symptoms such as sleepiness.

[kteague]

The sad thing about comparison is what it can do to our heart and mind. The one who doesn't understand how difficult others might have it may gloat in their supposed superiority and be dismissive of the other person's difficilty. The one having more difficulty may feel "less than" as if their difficulty is a personal lacking. One of the hurtful things about my days of decline was knowing some others saw me as weak or not strong enough to handle the current adversity. They had no idea the strength it took just to keep living. Your experience is your experience, and is no more or no less valid or valued by another's experience. I know you have had struggles with this treatment and wish for you effective treatment as well as insight into any other contributing factors. And yes, mild/moderate sleep apnea can be very detrimental to one's well being. Whether it is solely responsible for your symptoms we can't know.

[jnk...]

Kathy's post is a well-worded reminder of the importance of acknowledging the difficulty of the battle without discounting the insidiousness of the enemy that is sleep-breathing trouble. The battle can be MUCH harder for the mild-to-moderate than for the moderate-to-severe. Someone with mild OSA by the AHI numbers often has a more difficult condition to treat than someone with more severe OSA, so that the comparison aspect of it all sort of gets flipped around upside-down.

That is partly because a person with severe OSA may feel much better than he has felt in years the very first night he wears a mask, so the treatment is in a sense easier for him. On the other hand, a person with mild OSA may suffer worse sleep than he has ever experienced for many nights and weeks while adapting to using CPAP, if he can.

So from that angle, mild OSA can be more severe of a problem to solve than severe OSA.

[mesenteria]

The guys hi-fiving in derision over those who decide to take their PAP regimen seriously, or who seem immune to apnea, are simply kidding themselves. We don't know what their blood pressure is like, their kidney function, their optic nerves, and so on. People typically lose function slowly in those cases, and if they are as cavalier about consulting physicians in general, and regularly, as they are about a known disorder that they should probably be treating, they should hope beyond hope that they will somehow outlive you or even enjoy a quality of life better than you do for long. Good luck with that. Optimism counts for something...I guess.

I cannot answer you more directly because I don't know much about you, but I would suppose that the answer must be yes. For you and many others, it whacks you hard. Some hardy people can drink and smoke all their lives and be found stiff a month out of touch two weeks past their 95th birthdays. With a grin on their faces not attributable to rictus.

I think every responsible and sober person should address their interests as they think best. Live and let live.

[chunkyfrog]

Life and death is always a crap shoot.
There are always exceptions to every rule;
but the rules do apply to most.
Trust your effort--or trust in luck.

[zoocrewphoto]

I would like to add that doctors use the ahi to determine severity. While they look at other numbers too, they aren't calculated into that level of severity chart.

For example, I have a very high ahi (79+) with frequent, short events. My oxygen saturation stays up pretty well. My sleep is lighter than it should be, and I have bad sleep quality without cpap.

My mom has sleep apnea also, but hers is very different. She has a much lower ahi than mine, in the moderate range (15-30). But her events are longer, causing her oxygen saturation to dip down and stay down for awhile. She feels like she sleeps fine (doesn't wake up or toss and turn), but she feels like crap physically from the damage from oxygen deprivation. She is considered mild, but I think her sleep apnea is actually more damaging than mine.

There are so many factors with sleep apnea as well whatever else you may be dealing with. Just because the number is low, doesn't mean it won't bother you or shouldn't bother you.

Something else to consider. Most people who are severe don't start at severe. At some point, we probably did not have sleep apnea. It started as mild, and progressed its way to where it is now. And will probably continue to get worse over time as we age.