opticalpopsicle wrote:Cool! When you find out more I'd love to hear about it. If adenosine builds up while awake, not asleep, (and I hear caffeine blocks the adenosine receptors), then why do I wake up groggy? It almost seems to me that the brain wave activity doesn't quite switch over to awake mode for some reason. Seems to me that sleep apnea in general with the nightly hypoxia and the adrenaline rushes is in itself very unhealthy for the heart, causing cell death with resulting SA node dysfunction, rather than being instead that everyone here has high adenosine levels,no?
I'd not say "everyone", but let's theorize a moment that during the day adenosine rises in the cortex and basal fore-brain (fact), this is what makes you sleepy (fact), you go to sleep and during NORMAL sleep it declines (fact), but what if with significantly interrupted sleep it does not get sufficiently depleted, but accumulates a bit each night (my pea brain theory of mine). Repeat night after night, weeks, months, maybe years. In my case with 10 AWAKES per hour on average last Summer it was not depleting much at all. It made me VERY groggy, so I drank LOTS of caffeine to knock out the grog, but caffeine does nothing to the adenosine level (fact), it just keeps climbing. Now, adenosine is a really odd substance, it's both an anti-arrhythmic and also an arrhythmic (fact). It works for people who have supra-ventricular tachycardia (about only that) and they get reverted with a strong IV pulse of the stuff and have odd symptoms; sometimes heart stoppage but more often a flurry of PACs and PVCs because adenosine is also an arrhythmic, known to in some cases cause a-fib and v-fib (also documented). Caffeine at high levels causes arrhythmias, too (pretty sure on that one). Add on the apnea events stress to the heart and adrenal effects. I believe that before I got APAP treatment the combination of the apnea heart stress, adrenaline spikes, high adenosine, and the high caffeine I was consuming to "counteract" the adenosine grog, and maybe other factors, I had more and more arrhythmias as it all got worse and POW... ventricular fibrillation struck me one afternoon in a parking lot. Luckily, it resolved.
OK, now I have my APAP, arrhythmias are pretty much gone over time as the adenosine levels have depleted, heart stress is lower, less adrenal spikes but I'm still groggy and have mild narcoleptic symptoms. Adenosine controls the sleep-wake process and the sleep-wake boundary so a slight over abundance may yield slight narcoleptic symptoms (pea brained theory of mine). So, I theorize that my adenosine levels are much lower than before but still elevated relative to a normal person. I know I don't have sleep debt, nor sleep inertia except on the rare morning (like never) that I wake from deep sleep. I'm nearing my limit on what I can do for making my sleep less interrupted (is still some), so I'm still on the hunt to get better.
That's a taste of my hair brained theory but most everything, maybe including some of the assumptions I've made, is supported by NIH and other references like Wiki, drugs.com... more to go. I'll search for some peer reviewed journal papers on studying chronic adenosine levels, their effect and it's relation to the apnea patient. I hope there are some. I bet I'm at least close to right. Most adenosine papers I've read so far are about fast and hard, saline pushed IV injections, which are major pulses, not long term chronic, accumulating.
The afib propensity aspect to sleep apnea may be afoot here, too.
If it sounds mangled, it's because I'm REALLY tired and need to get some sleep. G'nite.
