monitored while spending the night in a medical building, or you might do the study at home using a device to measure your breathing (the type of test administered usually depends on your health insurance). The results of this test will help doctors determine whether or not you’re suffering from sleep apnea, Dr. Rowley says.
The good news is that a number of treatments can help sleep apnea patients. Different devices can help you rest easier if you have sleep apnea, chief among them the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine. “It’s basically a device you’d wear over your nose that prevents the collapse of the airway during the night,” Dr. Rowley says. “[The CPAP machine] is the most studied and most effective therapy for sleep apnea,” he adds.
Other treatment options include a dental device worn during the night, which pulls your lower jaw forward just a couple of millimeters, Dr. Barone explains. This serves to pull the tongue away from the back of the throat, he adds.
Lastly, surgical options are becoming more popular, Dr. Barone says, explaining that some patients opt for an implantable nerve stimulator inserted in their chest wall. The stimulator is connected to the nerve that controls the patient’s tongue, and what it does to treat sleep apnea is it “stiffens up the tongue,” Dr. Barone explains.
If a patient is suffering from sleep apnea because they are obese, there’s a chance their condition will clear up if they lose weight. However, “it’s possible, but it doesn’t happen as much as we’d like,” Dr. Rowley says. But other lifestyle habits might help patients with sleep apnea manage the condition. Among these is avoiding alcohol close to bedtime since alcohol can be disruptive to sleep and make the muscles relax even more, which might make the tongue more likely to fall backwards and block the airway, Dr. Barone says. He adds that it might also be helpful to sleep on your side if you suffer from sleep apnea, since this too can affect whether or not the tongue obstructs the airway.
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