Daytime symptoms
- Excessive daytime sleepiness
- Fatigue/ Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Morning headaches
- Myalgia’s/ Body pain / Fibromyalgia
- Difficulty concentrating/ short term memory loss
GIT effects/IBS:
- Chronic diarrhea, constipation, indigestion, acid reflux or bloating. Similarly, since you don’t need to digest food when you’re fighting, blood gets shunted away from your entire gastrointestinal system to the heart muscles, leading to these symptoms.
- We already know that stress can aggravate acid production in the stomach.
LPRD, or laryngopharyngeal (throat and voice box) reflux
The common complaints of LPRD include one or many of the following:
- chronic throat clearing, chronic lump in throat
- postnasal drip
- hoarseness
- cough, throat or ear pain,
- Difficulty swallowing, tightness or pain with swallowing.
Nasal congestion, sinus or ear infections:
- Studies have shown that UARS can cause acid reflux to the throat but can also reflux into the lungs, causing or aggravating asthma or bronchitis.
- Acid can also reflux into the nose and ears causing more aggravating nasal congestion, sinus or ear infections.
Low blood pressure:
- UARS patients are frequently are dizzy or lightheaded, aggravated by standing up too soon.
- This is called orthostatic intolerance.
- They also have cold hands and feet.
Classic migraine and tension headaches:
Are also frequent in UARS along with TMJ (temporo-mandibular joint) problems, due to grinding and clenching of the teeth / Bruxism and TMJ which can also give you ear pain, headaches along the side of your head and can also wear down your teeth.
Depression, anxiety or attention deficit problems are associated with UARS
Patients resistant to treatment with anti-depressants may be suffering from UARS
Sleep disturbances:
- Frequent nocturnal awakenings / arousals resulting in deep sleep deprivation with
- Difficulties initiating sleep Insomnia
- Difficulties staying sleep Insomnia
- Bruxism during sleep
- Restless leg syndrome
- Unrefreshing sleep
Crazy or vivid dreams:
- People with UARS also state that they have crazy or vivid dreams or sometimes no dreams at all.
- This is because when you wake up while you’re dreaming in REM sleep; you’ve remembered your dreams vividly.
- By definition, all dreams are wild and vivid. Only because you tend to wake up more frequently when you are dreaming, do you remember your dreams more vividly.
No dreams at all:
Some people wake up as they begin to enter the dreaming stage, so they never dream at all.
Chronic cortisol stimulation
In addition, if you don’t sleep deeply, it’s been shown that your body produces increased levels of cortisol with resultant inflammation and disease such as:
Insulin resistance, leading to diabetes:
Cortisol lowers your immune system’s ability to fight infections and aggravate insulinresistance, leading to diabetes.
Difficulty losing weight:
And as we all know, cortisol is what makes you gain weight and eat more.
Family history is also very important
This is one way to gauge what the patient might look like in 20-40 years. And in many cases, patients with UARS or sleep apnea have one or more parents that snore severely with one or many of the cardiovascular consequences such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease. If one parent is noted to have had a heart attack or stroke in their 40’s or 50’s, we take the patient’s condition more seriously.