Have you ever wondered if your lack of sleep increases your weight or vice versa? Experts have proven that sleep apnea and weight gain are connected and impact each other. If left untreated, sleep apnea can lead to severe complications. Luckily, both are treatable and manageable. Learn how sleep apnea and weight gain are connected in this article. Log on to https://doralhw.org/specialties/bariatric/ know more about weight loss.

What is the connection between sleep apnea and weight gain?

Sleep apnea and weight gain are intricately connected. When you don’t sleep at night, it increases your hunger and makes you crave food. When you consume more calories than your body needs, especially from calorie-dense and carb-dense foods, it leads to weight gain. Daytime drowsiness and fatigue create problems caused by poor sleep quality. If you don’t get enough sleep, you lack the energy to move around and work out physically. Lack of sleep affects everybody, but particularly adolescents and growing children who tend to gain weight. Adolescence is a crucial time for brain growth and development; for that, they need to ensure good quality sleep to support it. Not getting enough sleep can adversely affect the brain growth region called the hypothalamus, which manages appetite and energy expenditure.

Similarly, when you eat excessively and out of mealtimes, you start gaining weight in different parts of your body, including the neck and upper airway’s soft tissues, which can restrict or block your airway when you sleep, leading to pauses in breathing and sleep disruption. A narrowed airway also caused snoring, a common symptom of OSA. Excessive weight gain also limits the lungs’ ability to take air in the body because fat buildup on the chest and abdomen can put pressure on the structures surrounding the lungs, lowering the amount of air the lungs can hold. With less air passing through, it causes the upper airway to collapse. In a 2019 study on obese adolescents, researchers found that the faster young people gain weight, the more likely they are to develop severe OSA and experience lower quality or duration of sleep.

Additionally, when appetite is dysregulated due to sleep-related changes, it impacts hormones, especially leptin and ghrelin. Leptin makes you feel full when you eat enough, and obese people have a high level of this hormone. It is found that people with sleep apnea have 50% more leptin levels compared to people who don’t have sleep apnea. Having too much leptin for long makes your body resistant to it, which prevents you from feeling satisfied after eating. At the same time, ghrelin levels also get elevated due to obesity and lack of sleep, which is responsible for making you feel hungry. This makes you very hungry, even after eating, you may eat too much and store those excess calories as fat.
So, in a way, both weight gain and obstructive sleep apnea cause each other and make each other worse.

Complications

Weight gain and sleep apnea can increase the risk of many other health issues, including:

• High blood pressure
• Cardiovascular disease
• Pulmonary hypertension
• Insulin resistance
• Type 2 diabetes
• Obesity
• Obesity hypoventilation syndrome
• Fatty liver disease

Obstructive sleep apnea can also cause chronic sleep loss, which leads to cognitive deficits like memory loss, drowsiness, and impaired decision-making. Some people are also at risk for mood disorders, nocturia, and decreased sex drive.

Treatment

To treat weight gain and sleep apnea, you need to take combined action because losing weight or treating sleep apnea doesn’t cure the other. However, you can see improvements in other condition symptoms when you work on one. For instance, if you lose weight with the help of dietary changes, increased physical activity, medications, and surgery, it helps to lower the breathing pauses of a person with OSA experiences during sleep, which also lowers daytime sleepiness. It also helps to lower blood pressure and improve a person’s overall well-being. Some people report that their symptoms get better over several years, despite them regaining up to 50% of the weight they lost, as time passes. However, it is effective for mild to moderate OSA, and less effective in severe cases.

Similarly, treating OSA with lifestyle changes, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines, oral appliances, or surgery makes it easier to lose weight. One study shows ghrelin levels that are higher in OSA patients, starting to get lower after 2 days of using CPAP treatment. However, long-term use of CPAP can produce conflicting results with weight gain; the reasons are unclear, so more research is needed.

Sleep apnea and weight gain can increase the risk of each other and make each other worse. Luckily, both conditions are treatable, and treating one can help to improve the other condition’s symptoms. Make sure you don’t ignore your symptoms and take timely action to manage both conditions and prevent their severe complications.

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