Dr. Michael Grandner

So that's why people with sleep apnea, they wake up and they feel like it's sort of like, I just ate a whole meal and I'm still hungry.

Oh yeah, untreated sleep apnea is a known risk factor for neurodegeneration, especially when it's more severe.

So this is the thing, mild to moderate sleep apnea is a gray area.

Severe sleep apnea seems very, that's 30 events or more an hour, seems very reliably tied to bad outcomes.

Mild seems like it's really only tied to bad outcomes when you also have daytime symptoms.

Like you're mostly treating like the fatigue and the memory issues, whatever.

You can still get cell death and you can get neuronal problems because you're, think of it this way.

Every time you have one of these respiratory events and you're having it, you know, maybe dozens of times per hour in the night, your oxygen drops.

And it's not the hypoxia that's the problem.

This is what a lot of people get wrong about sleep apnea.

It's not really the hypoxia.

It's the intermittent hypoxia.

So you're not hypoxic because what will happen is you drop a few points.

Most people, unless you have some other lungs, most people with sleep apnea, their O2 doesn't drop a lot.

For sustained amounts of time, unless you have like emphysema or something, it'll drop a few percentage points.

Then your body wakes up and then it recovers.

Then it drops again.

Then your body wakes up and it recovers and it drops.

So it's like, it's constantly putting out all these little fires all over the place.

The fires are never burning any houses down.