Well I was checking out a place where I bought my sleep apnea equipment and did a search in Google for reviews of a particular device.
For those who don't know, I suffer from OSA (Obstructive Sleep Apnea) - which basically means in a nutshell when you sleep at night and relax, your throat tissue kinda "closes" creating the condition where:
#1. You constantly wake up during the night - this alone has several nasty side effects at daytime
#2. Your oxygen level in the blood drops below normal levels - this also has nasty consequences eventually leading up to a nice heart attack.
The good news on this is that if you use a CPAP (constant Pressured Air something or whatever it was), which is basically wear a mask at night connected to an air pump, that will pump air at a certain pressure, the treatment is farily effective assuming you don't take off the mask at night (I did for about the first 2 months and now I can't sleep without it).
Oh, and if you lose weight significantly, assuming your OSA is not genetic, it will probably just "go away." Score one more for the many complications that being overweight can bring.
Well, I was reading this faq which is like a doctor's analysis (that has sleep apnea) on recent studies and apparently there's a study that points to some visual response being "laggy" even after a couple of months of CPAP. - "Visual P300" -
"“Visual P300” refers to a Visual Evoked Response Potential (see Glossary) or typical change in brain waves occuring 300 msec after a flash of light. The potential appears as a waveform. A waveform normal in its amplitude (strength) and latency (delay after the light) is taken as one sign of normal mental processing. The latency especially is related to attention. It is prolonged (delayed) in conditions of mental deterioration due to brain disease, like dementia (such as in Alzheimer’s Disease), in disorders of metabolism that affect the brain such as liver or kidney failure, with inborn inability to read properly, and mental impairment after head injury."
And now the big one:
"P300 latency is also prolonged with obstructive sleep apnea, whether or not the person feels sleepy.
This study asked the question whether CPAP would correct this abnormality"
So in other words, the study suggests there may be irreversible neruological/brain damage... yay! I can feel my IQ dropping already - although in cheesy IQ test Paul found I came up with a 131 and I am a "math processor" or such (yeah, that probably means that I used to be a Stephen Hawkins then, oh optimism... :-) ). Honestly, it doesn't scare me much now that I am using the CPAP mask, but it does scare me that I was probably having sleep apnea for years before I decided to go through a sleep study... those are the years were permanent damage could have been done and I wouldn't be surprised if I suffered of this for even four years before the treatment.
I can say that there are times were I have felt somtimes tired (in the last years) and sometimes that "I don't feel I am here" - hmm not good!
Amazing how all can get mixed. God, good think I don't smoke or drink, because that would definitively do it for me.
Oh well, better order that new equipment and continue losing weight!
a few more year of this and I might finally be able to beat you at a video game...
Posted by: seeker | December 09, 2003 at 10:04 AM
:-P
- Raist
Posted by: Raist3d | December 09, 2003 at 07:33 PM