I have already written a couple of posts on sleep apnea -"Sleep apnea - what is it, how common is it and how does it affect mortality & physical health?" and "Sleep apnea - how does it affect psychological health?".  In this third & last post of the sequence, I'll explore how we can recognise sleep apnea and what we can do about it.

I have already written a first post "Sleep apnea - what is it, how common is it and how does it affect mortality & physical health?" which highlights that sleep apnea is a common, regularly unrecognised disorder, occurring in approaching 1 in 5 adults and that, particularly as it becomes more severe - probably approximately 1 in 10 sufferers (Li et al, 2015) - sleep apnea is linked with a wide range of serious diseases and with significantly increased death rates.  In this second post, I'll look at the relevance of sleep apnea for psychiatric disorders.

Sleep apnea is a common, but frequently unrecognised, contributor to psychological difficulties and to health problems more generally.  I would like to look at a series of questions about this disorder - what is it, how common is it, why is it important, how do you recognise it, and what can be done about it?

I was talking to an old friend recently and I remarked on how well he was looking.  He said he had lost two stone in weight and his waist circumference had gone down from 42 to 34 inches.  Wow!  I was very interested to hear how he had done it and he very kindly agreed to write his story:  

A Wake-up Call 

Salman Rushdie "Those who do not have the power over the story that dominates their lives - the power to retell it, re-experience it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change - truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts."

Ouch, a very interesting international health survey, that has just been released, reports:

"Middle-aged Britons are experiencing a mid-life health crisis, according to new research from Bupa, which shows that those aged 45-54 are more likely to be obese, more likely to smoke and more likely to suffer from depression than their peers around the world.

The international Bupa Health Pulse study, which asked more than 13,000 people in 12 different countries questions about their health and lifestyles has shown that late-middle age is the toughest time health-wise for Britons. No other country in the survey - which included Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia showed such a consistent range of unhealthy results for this age group.

The study, which questioned more than 2,000 people in the UK, found:

 "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."  John Donne