Sleep Apnea, Sleep Disorders, CPAP, BiPAP - Help Me Breath

I was unaware of this. Good, now I have something to do at work today! My AHI is up to 10 but my AI is still down around 1.8. I need to get back over to cpaptalk to figure this out. As far as I understand, the AHI is all events (snoring, etc) and the AI is apneas, so this would be the one I want to keep low.

Dmitriy Kruglyak (creator of trusted.md) asked me in December to listen to a webinar put out by the drug company Cephalon on their sleep apnea / narcolepsy drug, Provigil, and to blog about it. As you can see, I’m a little behind in my commitments! Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition that affects 18 million Americans, and is linked to heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, depression, liver disease, not to mention various cognitive impairments, so beyond the obvious problems of fatigue and inability to function well due to lack of sleep, sleep apnea has far-reaching health consequences. Good sleep is one of the foundational health principles of everything – one simply CANNOT be healthy without adequate sleep.

Full story here

Being a major consumer of Ambien, sufferer of sleep apnea, and a worker with crappy insurance, I am more than well aware of how much money is being made on sleep disorders. This really validates what I have been complaining about, loudly, for some time now. Please read the entire article and start complaining yourself.
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[Excerpt] The days following Heath Ledger’s death have swirled with speculation, with tales of hard drugs and prescription pills, of anti-depressants and sleeping tablets. Amid all the mutterings about heroin abuse and cocaine addiction, it is the sleeping pills that seem most startling. Ledger, plagued by the chronic insomnia that often accompanies depression, had apparently come to rely on medication to get him to sleep. “I warned him to stop,” said Jack Nicholson. “I tell people about Ambien [sleeping pill]. Somebody said, ‘Take this, it’s mild.’ I almost drove off a cliff 50 yards from my house.”

[Excerpt] In 2006 Forbes magazine ran an article about what it termed “the sleep racket”, the $20-billion industry that bloomed around our pursuit of the perfect night’s sleep: money spent on herbal balms, mattresses, sleep clinics and, oh yes, sleeping pills.

Full Story Here