Sleep Apnea - Most Common Treatment Featuring: Paul Sweeney, RRT, Sleep apnea specialist

Duration: 1:35

If you have heart disease and sleep apnea, a CPAP machine might be a viable option to treat you. The most common treatment for sleep apnea surprisingly is a machine that you have to wear at night. It's not pretty, but it works. If there was a simpler way to do this, such as surgery, we would do it but there's not.

So the most common treatment is something called a CPAP machine. This is a small bedside pump that produces air that hooks up to a hose that is attached to a mask that you wear on your nose. The pressure in the mask is blown into your airway and it prevents the tissue and the jaw from blocking your airway. Therefore, you go into a deep sleep, you feel rested, you wake up feeling refreshed. It's not pretty, but it works.

Most people that try these machines, it takes a couple weeks to get used to but once they sleep with it and they feel better, then it usually validates the need for the machine. If you think you have sleep apnea and you think that CPAP might be something that would be a treatment for you, the most common thing is to go to your family doctor. He can refer you to a sleep doctor or he can refer you to a local provider. And often a lot of these CPAP machines are given out on a trial basis so you can try the machine see if it's going to work for you; to see if you respond to treatment and to see if a lot of your symptoms improve, and then it will validate if the machines beneficial for you.

Presenter: Mr. Paul Sweeney, Sleep Specialist, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Sleep Specialist