Have you checked if you have sleep apnea?

Question

on a whim i posted my fitness tracker sleep stats online today and immediately got 4 people telling me i have sleep apnea. read more about it and realized I have all the symptoms. Apparently 30% of people do? especially overweight people.looking into a CPAP machine now. can't believe I have gone so long with my base sleep assumption being "just get 8 hours bro". a lot of sleep science is probably overoptimized unreproduceable bunkum but i buy the sleep apnea thing.

jfengel · Accepted Answer

Yeah. I actually feel fine and don't have many sleep disorder symptoms, but I occasionally wake up gasping, and people who share a room with me have noticed more of them that I was unaware of.
I had a sleep study done. They noticed a few apnea incidents, but not enough to warrant a diagnosis of sleep apnea.
Don't get a CPAP without a diagnosis. Anything you can buy without a doctor's approval is going to be potentially dangerous. And the symptoms of apnea can also indicate a lot of other things; don't cover them up by trying to treat them yourself.
The diagnosis will require a sleep study. It wasn't a ton of fun (wired up to an EKG and had to get help disconnecting it in order to pee), but I now have tons of data about what my sleep actually does. Not that it means much to me directly, but the professionals did a good job interpreting it.

gusestrella · Answer

Had severe sleep apnea and used machine for over 10years. Loved it ! Would travel a ton internationally and always had it with me’ - even on Asia trips. I simply couldn’t function without it. Anyway had lapband surgery and loss hundreds of pound and found started to have sleep issuesagain. Turns out as lost weight needed to change pressure pumped by machine. So had to redo sleep studies to tweak setting and then started to work great again.
Several years back on last study was told i didn’t need the machine anymore. It actually was again affecting my sleep using it. It took me like two years to get back comfortable not using it. I was so happy that was hard to give up. I-still keep an eye and if start to have sleep issue will do another study and if need machine will be happy to get one again
So strongly suggest to do study vs just getting machine. Well worth it

readonthegoapp · Answer

I think a real sleep study / test is prob warranted-- rather than going straight to cpap.

jstx1 · Answer

> on a whim i posted my fitness tracker sleep stats online today and immediately got 4 people telling me i have sleep apneaWhat in your sleep data gave it away?

xchip · Answer

Why talking about this in hacker News?