What is Sleep Apnea?

Sleep Apnea literally means 'without breath'. During your sleep you will have pauzes in your normal breathing behaviour. Having a few breaks between your breathings won't be that much of a problem and even happends to everybody while sleeping, but when you have breaks of 10 seconds and these breaks occur 10 times a hour, you can officially speak of sleep apnea.

There are 2 forms of sleep apnea, Central and Obstructive. The Central form will happen when the brains aren't giving enough signs to let you breath. The short name for the Central form is csas. If the muscles in your stomache relax while you are sleeping and your tongue and other week parts in the stomach block breathing we call this the Obstructive form, or osas.

Osas is the most common form, but it often happens that people have both forms. At this moment there are still alot of people who don't know that they suffer from this sleep apnea syndrom. In the next post i will tell you about the most common sleep apnea symptoms.