Mis-diagnosed Sleep Apnea it could happen to you TOO!

I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea . I have been using a CPAP
machine for about a year. NOW the doctors discovered the reason!

I have an enlarged thyroid gland which has pushed my windpipe and
esophagus to the extreme right which is why it is difficult to breathe.

This could be the cause of the apnea . If you feel your neck and one side feels larger than the other, see an Endocrinologist or ENT doctor to get checked out.

You may be able to give up your CPAP machines if they can treat the real cause....

Just a suggestion. I was misdiagnosed! You may be too.

How long have you been CURED, and when did you have another sleep study to conferm it was cured.

I hope for your sake you did get cured, but DeNile also is wide and deep. Jim

Thanks for sharing, SugarsOwner. At least that year on CPAP wasn't a total loss. It kept you sleeping and rested for that year that your doctor's messed up and failed to detect the swollen thyroid. Shouldn't that also have shown up on blood tests?? They checked my thyroid and B12 levels and some other blood levels before referring me for a sleep study.

I also had my thyroid checked long before CPAP. One of the standard tests it seems when a patient complains of being tired all the time.

I am sorry you doc missed it but now you can work on that issue.

Please let us know the outcome once the doctor corrects the thyroid issue.

Dream On....

Most apnea is caused by the tongue falling into the back of the throat.

Sugarsowner,
Thanks for your post - caused me to do some reading that proved very informative. Much of the literature at least loosely associates hypothyroidism with disordered breathing, including air hunger and sleep apnea. Granted, many people with hypothyoidism are also overweight, but the articles seemed to relate some of the problems to a low T4 and levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. Even read of a case where the trachea was displaced by a goiter. I have a personal friend who allowed her thyroid to get so large (trying to avoid surgery) that both her breathing and swallowing were affected. By far the most interesting article (listed below) was about someone whose thyroid gland was ectopic, actually growing in the back of their tongue instead of their throat! (That caught my attention because I have ectopic pancreatic tissue growing in my stomach.) Thanks for giving me cause to read about this, because I have frequent air hunger. Guess I should get my thyroid checked, especially since my mother had been on thyroid meds for over 20 years. Best wishes. Hope you are indeed"cured" - just be sure you don't have OSA in addition to the thyroid issues.
Kathy


Lingual Thyroid Causing Obstructive Sleep Apnea
http://meeting.chestjournal.org/cgi/con ... 6/4/999S-a