Poor Sleep Prevents Brain From Storing Memories

I also was diagnosed with sleep apnea... I was routinely waking up 1-4 times every night thinking I had to pee... It turns out my brain was waking up my body due to low O2 saturation, then the conscious part of my brain was saying "why am I awake? It must be because I have to pee" so I would...

My sleep study showed that I stopped breathing 262 times in the short 4 hours of sleep with the recorder... So the 'cure' was CPAP which I just knew wasn't going to work for me... I went to a different sleep clinic and they prescribed a dental appliance which looks like this:

http://www.sleepandhealth.com/sites/www.sleepandhealth.com/files/images/Article_images/TAP.jpg [sleepandhealth.com]

It brings the lower jaw forward which helps prevent constriction of your airway when you relax during sleep. It has an adjustment screw so you can fine tune it. You start with the screw all the way relaxed to become accustomed to wearing the appliance, and then slowly over time you turn it forward until you start to sleep well. Then you do a followup sleep study so they can compare and check the adjustment.

I can travel with it, no sore throat in the morning, no whirring next to the bed, etc.

The first night I had the appliance in, with the adjustment screw all the way relaxed, my wife kept waking up in a panic to check whether I was still breathing. I was no longer snoring and because that was a sound that was so pervasive in our marriage, she had trouble sleeping without hearing my snoring...

Now after two years, I consistently sleep through the night and get a solid 7-8 hours each night. I no longer feel a need to nap in the afternoons or evenings. I can't say my memory is back to normal, though... But I put that down to my advanced age.

After telling my dad about it, he got an appliance as well. He tried CPAP when he was first diagnosed but after a month or two of trying it, he was sleeping worse because of the damn machine and hoses and mask so he gave it up. The dental appliance changed his life. He's going on 18 months with it and his health has improved, his weight has improved, and he's finding it easier to keep his blood sugar under control.. The sleep clinic that initially prescribed and sold him the CPAP machine claimed to have heard of the dental appliances but said they didn't work so CPAP was the only solution. So he came into town and went to the clinic that I went to, to get his dental appliance.

So if you can't tolerate CPAP, then consider talking to the sleep clinic about the dental appliances. Note: they're quite expensive and they're not the same as the cheap "boil and bite" ones, which don't last very long and don't allow you to adjust the offset of the lower jaw.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/LYNseFnfWgU/story01.htm

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