You’re exhausted. Your throat hurts. You’re irritable and you feel like you don’t have enough energy to make it through the day.
Sleep doesn’t help. Most mornings, you wake up and it’s like you haven’t even been to bed.
Your partner’s not faring much better. They complain you’re keeping them up at night with your snoring.
Worse, they tell you that you’re gasping in your sleep. No wonder your sleep is disturbed and you start awake, almost panicked, throughout the night.
So you got to the doctor and get the diagnosis: sleep apnea. But what is your sleep apnea prognosis?
Fortunately, it may be much better than it used to be, thanks to exciting new advances in the area of stem cell research.
Read on to learn more about sleep apnea, what it is, what effects it has on your overall health and well being, and how stem cells may play a role in your recovery!
What is Sleep Apnea?
Sleep apnea is a common condition that causes sufferers to repeatedly stop breathing in their sleep.
If you’re over 40, you are at significant risk of experiencing sleep apnea. This risk only increases if you’re overweight, have a family history of the disorder, or are a post-menopausal woman.
A number of factors can contribute to sleep apnea. You may have an excess of weight around the neck area, or your neck and airways may be naturally rather narrow. You may also have a genetic predisposition.
Whatever the cause, the results, and the dangers, are the same.
Sleep apnea is far more than just not sleeping well. It’s far more than keeping your partner up at night.
Studies show that sleep apnea dramatically increases your risk of high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and even death from some types of cancer.
Diagnosing Sleep Apnea
Sleep apnea is particularly challenging because it is not only difficult to diagnose, but also to treat effectively.
Traditionally, the only way to diagnose sleep apnea accurately is to undergo a sleep study. However, some people may be reluctant to go this route, because it requires spending the night at a sleep lab where technicians monitor patients’ breathing, heart function, and brain waves while they sleep.
Without a sleep study, doctors are left to diagnose the disorder based largely on patient self-reports and an examination of the structures of the patient’s nose and throat.
This can mean that lots of sleep apnea cases are missed, while treatment plans for others are not very effective because the principal causes of the disorder have not been determined.
Standard Treatment and Your Sleep Apnea Prognosis
The most common treatment for sleep apnea is the use of CPAP. These machines provide continuous air pressure to the mouth, nose, or both. This ensures that the patient never stops breathing during the night.
However, some patients have difficulty adjusting to the CPAP machines and may fail to use them nightly, as required. Even when used properly, CPAP is not a cure. It significantly reduces the health risks associated with sleep apnea, but the underlying condition remains.
Enter stem cell therapy.
What is Stem Cell Therapy?
Though the history of stem cell research has been quite controversial, now, more than ever, scientists, physicians, and patients alike are beginning to recognize the wide-ranging benefits of stem cell therapy.
Stem cell therapies are increasingly being used or researched to treat a host of conditions, ranging from blindness to breast cancer.
These therapies are even being explored for combatting drug-resistant infections and in the treatment of spina bifida in infants.
What makes stem cell therapy so unique and powerful is that these cells can be genetically manipulated to correspond to most any type of cell in the human body.
This can help to reverse the effects of injury or disease at the cellular level, replacing sick and defective cells with new, healthy ones.
Best of all, in most cases, stem cells no longer need to be harvested from human embryos, the main source of controversy surrounding these treatments.
New technology allows these cells to be collected from adult cells or from umbilical cord blood, with no harm done to the donor.
Stem Cell Therapy and Sleep Apnea
Despite the increasing use of stem cell therapy to treat a broad range of medical conditions, research into the use of stem cells to treat sleep apnea is relatively new.
Existing studies, though still fairly scarce, are very promising, however. Research suggests that stem cells taken from adult bone marrow can reduce the tendency of the airway to collapse, which is one of the leading causes of obstructive sleep apnea.
Airway collapse can result not only from obesity but also from genetic factors and simply from the unique structure of the patient’s mouth, nose, and neck.
In addition, these studies suggest that bone marrow stem cells can reduce the inflammation resulting from oxygen deprivation and increasing the chance for additional bouts of apnea. This creates a dangerous cycle where lack of oxygen boosts inflammation and inflammation increases the likelihood you will stop breathing during the night, further raising inflammation levels.
Research suggests that stem cell therapy can stop this cycle in its tracks.
Even more exciting, stem cells taken from bone marrow have also been shown to protect against the cardiovascular effects of oxygen loss, thus reducing the chances that sleep apnea will lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke.
The Takeaway
Sleep apnea is a common and life-altering disorder. It not only diminishes the quality of life, leaving sufferers tired, sick, and miserable.
But your sleep apnea prognosis does not have to be dire. Stem cell therapies are increasingly proving to be a brave new world of sleep apnea treatment.
These treatments can not only help to prevent incidences of sleep apnea but can also protect against its harmful cardiovascular effects.
Please visit our website to learn more about the vast benefits of and promising new research into stem cell therapy!