Obstructive sleep apnea means that you're, in essence, obstructing your airway many times during the night. You're suffocating yourself when the upper airway is closing off. Just like the fat that accumulates around your waist and hips, fat can accumulate in the soft tissues of our upper airway. . Apnea means there's an absence of breathing. Folks like you with OSA have periods lasting from a few seconds up to a minute where there's no breathing going on. You're abruptly awakening, gasping, snorting or choking and returning to sleep - without any memory of what happened. All you know is that you are tired in the morning no matter how many hours of sleep you have had.

Why worry? Daytime sleepiness may cause you to nod off behind the wheel. That's dangerous! Nodding off at work cant be good for productivity or job security. During those periods of non breathing, the blood isn't getting oxygen. That can, over time, contribute to permanent and irreversible right-sided heart failure. There are also links between OSA and coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and strokes. It may also contribute to the changes that lead to diabetes. There's a lot of resistance to the prospect of wearing a special "CPAP" face mask and putting up with the noise and inconvenience of a machine that uses air pressure to keep the airway open. But if your a golfer OSA may be costing you strokes, A recent study done on golfers with OSA showed that treatment knocked off as much as three strokes off their score.