Sleep Apnea must be a Global Public Health Issue
Sleep apnea is becoming a growing cause of concern globally. Almost every part of the world has quite a large number of people who are suffering from sleep apnea disorder. Sleep apnea has now been identified as a major health issue because of its close linkages with several other deadly diseases and disorders.
Obstructive sleep apnea sufferers are expected to be around 20-30 million in the United States alone and across the world the number of such people is growing exponentially. Obstructive sleep apnea has established linkages with deadly health problems like cardio-vascular problems, hypertension, co-morbidities, and even motor vehicle accidents.
National health statistics of the United States reveals that almost 38,000 deaths caused due to cardio-vascular problems have been related to the sleep apnea in one way or another. The rate of rising of sleep apnea cases across the world is mainly attributed to growing obesity problems in entire western world and simultaneously in the developing countries.
Inherent complications of the deadly disorder called sleep apnea are a major cause of concern as the problem is increasing in prevalence. This has increased greater pressure on public health authorities and policy makers across the world. Sleep apnea is a growing public health issue as the diagnosis of sleep apnea at right time is extremely critical.
Conventional methods of sleep apnea diagnosis and its treatment have been found to be quite expensive and time-consuming. Among the entire worst limiting factor is availability and accessibility of well-equipped sleep centers having competent and qualified sleep doctors. Majority of the western countries have such facilities but it is quite insufficient to meet the growing demand. The waiting lists for the sleep medicine services are becoming longer each day. On the contrary, developing countries hardly have such facilities and a full-fledged well equipped sleep center providing all services to the patients are simply non-existence.
Sleep apnea diagnosis and treatment requires a robust system and infrastructure in place. The policy makers of the developing countries specifically need to revise their priorities and must pay attention to this deadly disorder affecting their huge populations. It is even more surprising that there exists no national statistics with established database to substantiate the severity of the problem.
Creating basic health facilities for sleep apnea is extremely important for attending the public health issues. Developing countries should attempt on increasing the overall awareness among its populations so that people must understand what they are going through. It is really unfortunate that majority of the people who snore do not even know that this could be an initial stage of a deadly disease called sleep apnea. Most of these people across the world even do not know that they are suffering from sleep apnea as they were never diagnosed simply because there are no such specified testing facilities in their countries.
It is high time that the governments be aware of this rising problem. An advance preparation would be quite useful on this regard.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:30 am
I had no idea that 20-30 million in the United States suffer from sleep apnea in the U.S. alone. When I was diagnosed with it, I felt like it must be very rare since I hadn’t heard of it before. It was pretty difficult to find out information about it, at first. Thankfully, now there is a lot of great information on the internet about treatments like CPAP machines.