Sleep Apnea

If a person is diagnosed with sleep apnea, that means that they have pauses in their breathing when they sleep. This happens when the upper airway gets to be narrow as the muscles naturally relax during sleep. This then causes a decrease in oxygen in the blood and leads to disturbed sleep. If left untreated, this can lead to hypertension increased chances of contracting diabetes or a stroke.

When a person has this condition, during sleep the heart is deprived of oxygen which causes damage to this vital organ. To treat this doctors prescribe a CPAP mask: a continuous positive airway pressure mask.

The CPAP delivers a steady stream of compressed air through a hose to mask over the nose which keeps the airway open under pressure, removing the obstruction to breathing.

Ohio State University Medical Center did a study with the CPAP mask to find out how this affected the heart. The doctors there took two sets of MRI's of 13 patients who were diagnosed with sleep apnea: one before they started their CPAP treatment, and one after several weeks. They found that before treatment, the patients had cardiomegaly, an enlargement of the heart. In the second MRI, after treatment, the doctors noticed that the hearts had significantly reduced in size, specifically in their right ventricle. This was the result in all of the 13 patients being studied.

CPAP mask

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